Oppn urges JERC to reject electricity dept petition

PANAJI: The opposition MLAs on Wednesday submitted a memorandum to the chairman of Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission (JERC) strongly opposing the proposed power tariff for the financial year 2020-2021.
In a letter signed by 10 opposition MLAs, they demanded that the JERC hearing should not be conducted without making the public fully aware and the electricity department's submission and petition should be rejected.
The opposition members alleged that the proposed change in electricity billing approach from telescopic to non-telescopic consumers as specified in public notice issued on January 10, 2020 was a way to mislead the consumers and charge them at a much higher tariff than the prevailing ones. They claimed that though the existing tariff for low tension domestic (LTD) consumers for financial year 2019-2020 and the proposed tariff for financial year 2020-2021 was exactly the same, the fine print in the advertisement of the public notice proposes a change in billing approach for the financial year 2020-2021 and in another paragraph explains the proposed non-telescopic billing approach.
They appealed to the JERC chairman not to approve the petition and to reject all the submissions made by the electricity department.
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