SERC to hear public opinion

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The State Electricity Regulatory Commission will hear the public’s opinion on a KSEB plea to legitimise its practice of collecting service connection charges and line rental from consumers.The KSEB in a petition filed last month, had asked the Commission to authorise it to collect the charges. The KSEB had been collecting line rental and service connection charges from consumers earlier also, but had not got the approval of the Commission after the Commission was formed. In fact, the Commission had ordered the power utility not to collect the charges. Since then, the KSEB had been trying to get the Commission’s approval in this matter.Through the current petition, the KSEB targets the LT consumer category in which the domestic consumers who form the lion’s share of the KSEB’s consumer population, falls. As monthly line rental, the KSEB seeks to collect 5 paise for single phase meters, 10 paise for three phase meters and 50 paise as post-insertion charge. These are to be collected for a period of three years. The KSEB has also specified separate rates for the five LT categories of consumers by way of service connection charges.Only consumers availing of electricity connection under the Own Your Electricity Connection (OYEC) scheme were paying up the full estimated cost of the connection to the KSEB. The rest of the applicants has to remit only a nominal amount.According to KSEB, in 2009-10 alone, it released 2,88,331 connections to consumers who remitted the entire estimated amount. But another 1,67,929 consumers got connections by paying only a part of the amount - Rs 13.96 crore - by way of service connection charges, when the total estimated cost was Rs 112.98 crore - Rs 99.02 crore more than was collected from this category.