UP farmers plug in reforms switch, now pay for power

Don’t pay your bills, Tikait had told the farmers at the time, and the latter had gone on to not submit any for years. But now Shamli ranks second among tehsils with the largest collections in rural areas.

In the western rural belt alone, Rs 35 crore a month has been recovered on an average for the past four months. The success is so unexpected that the World Bank, which has not had anything good to say about governance in UP in the recent past, has showered praise on Paschimanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd, Meerut (which controls the Western belt).

While the recovery is not so high in other rural belts of the state, it is on the upswing. In eastern UP, it has gone up by 10 per cent in the past four months.

In rural Lucknow and Agra-Kanpur belt, it is up by nearly 4 per cent.

‘‘The DISCOMs must follow the example of Meerut in undertaking measures… that have already led to visible improvement in bill collection and transparency of operations,’’ observed a five-member World Bank team led by Task Leader L. Monari during their visit last month.

‘‘Our new experience is that farmers want to pay their dues and also have the capacity to pay,’’ says Paschimanchal’s Managing Director A K Awasthi. ‘‘Our base level of recovery of dues was so low in the past that we can only progress from there.’’

Over 200 farmers who had more than Rs 1 lakh as dues paid the money under the One-time Settlement Scheme.

One farmer called Hansa, who had not paid for six years, coughed up Rs 1,0164 at village Dulhera in Meerut. Another, Karan Singh of village Chindani, had not paid since the inception of power supply in 1994. He too settled his arrears of Rs 1.14 lakh.

A total of 22,000 farmers opted for the One-time Settlement Scheme. Under it, farmers were promised a waiver of interest on their arrears if they paid their bills.

While such schemes had been offered earlier too, the response was incredible this time. ‘‘It was a cocktail of tactics and coercion that did the trick,’’ says Awasthi.

Paschimanchal refused to repair damaged transformers in villages where farmers had not cleared their dues. At other places, DISCOM introduced hand billing.

At Sarfabad, a village that counts D P Yadav among its mostly Yadav population, none of the residents had paid dues since power first came to their homes in 1991. Coercion, apart from everything else, had failed.So Superintendent Engineer B.B. Singh says they decided to use the Yadav name.

‘‘We told them that now a ‘Yadav’ is in power, and that it would hurt the community’s image if they don’t pay their power dues… For the first time, we managed to get some money from the village.’’ At least 17 farmers have paid dues worth Rs 3.5 lakh. At village Harar-Fatehpur, which falls in Shamli, six transformers had been lying burnt for two months. These were not repaired as the villagers had not paid their dues.

The threat worked: in the past two months, 95 per cent of the villagers have coughed up money.

Starting from pradhan Rajnish Singh himself. ‘‘I have cleared my four-year-old dues,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m ready to pay more if the government supplies us good amount of power.’’

Awasthi promises people can count on that. ‘‘The DISCOM has put its own house in order by rewarding and punishing its officials. The officials who have recovered Rs 60 crore under the One-Time Settlement Scheme have been awarded 1 per cent of the collection (Rs 60 lakh). I have also suspended four senior officials and transferred seven for non-performance.’’

Power officials, incidentally happy to be unfettered by a minister, are now contemplating metered supply wherever the recovery is huge.