MSEB looks to defaulters for Rs 85 cr

Of the major defaulters, small-scale industries, commercial shops, individual consumers and even errant builders, alone account for Rs 45 crore whereas rest of Rs 40 crore are to be mainly recovered from some major sick industries in the city which have closed down and are awaiting their liquidation.

While for recovery of Rs 45 crore the MSEB can take action, for rest Rs 40 crore the board is finding itself in a virtually helpless state. In the latter case no action can be initiated as the matter is either subjudice or simply pending as in case of sick industrial units awaiting liquidation.

The gravity of the situation can be gauged by the fact that the MSEB has to recover an astronomical amount from its consumers which is even more than double of its own annual budget of about Rs 40 crore.

It may be mentioned that MSEB chairman Ashok Basak during his visit to the city recently had emphasised the need to improve the billing process of MSEB.

Explaining the strategy to deal with the problem Chief Engineer Ashok Shinde maintained that while the board was taking every possible step to initiate action against the major defaulters, it would be difficult to punish every defaulter in short span of time.

He said, “Now that we have shortlisted the defaulters, the board is initiating stern action against them in the descending order of bill amounts which the defaulters owe to MSEB.”

Citing various difficulties in taking punitive action against each of the defaulter Shinde said,“Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad collectively have seven divisions which are further divided into sub divisions. Going by the number of consumers and the list of defaulters, each subdivision has an average 7,000 consumers who are in arrears.”

“With limited staff which has to attend to matters such as complaints and giving new connections on priority basis daily, the recovery of bill in such cases becomes a very arduous task,” he added.

The power supply consumers are classified into two categories namely HT consumers who get their supply from high tension line (at 11,000 volts and above) and LT consumers which are provided power through the low tension wire (below 11,000 volts).

In Pune Urban Zone, out of 7.5 lakh consumers about 800 are fed electricity through the high tension line whereas the rest are supplied power through low tension line.

While for HT consumers MSEB issues bills on monthly basis, for the LT consumers the billing is done after every two months. As the number of HT consumers, mainly major industries, are very limited it is possible to closely monitor the billing process and subsequently initiate action in case of default in payment, but the same for the rest of the consumers becomes a practically impossible task, said Shinde.

For HT consumers we immediately slap a seven-day notice to the consumer for failing to pay the bill before the expiry date. If the bills are still not recovered, the power supply is disconnected on the eighth day itself, Shinde maintained.