Sheila Dixit defends whopping 22 percent hike in electricity tariff

Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit today strongly justified the 22 per cent hike in electricity tariff saying it was necessary in view of increase in power purchase cost even as several Congress MLAs slammed the decision and demanded a rollback. Firstpost had pointed out as early as in May that DERC will simply have to raise tariff given that private companies that were distributing power were running at losses of nearly 20%. This was after Reliance Infra’s dire warning that prices simply would have to go up. Given that the privatisation of power distribution was a much celebrated project of the Delhi government it was unlikely that they would have let it fail. At a meeting of the Congress Legislature Party here, several party MLAs, including Mukesh Sharma and Subhash Chopra, criticised the hike when people are “reeling under spiralling prices of essential commodities and vegetables.” [caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“DERC does the inevitable and raises power prices”][/caption] “The hike should be rolled back immediately,” said Uttam Nagar MLA Sharma. Senior party leader Chopra also slammed the move, saying it would put more burden on the common man. However, Dikshit defended the decision of city’s power regulator DERC to hike the tariff saying power purchase cost has increased significantly in the last few years while there has been no hike in tariff in the past five years in Delhi. “The tariff has been hiked after five years. In the last few years rates of fuel have increased by 100 per cent. The rates of gas, oil and LPG have all increased significantly,” she told reporters later. The Chief Minister said in spite of nearly 22 per cent hike, the power tariff in Delhi is still much less than Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and all the neighbouring states as well as metropolis barring Mumbai. “In spite of raising the tariff by 22 per cent, our rates are still less than Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring states. In fact it is less than all other metropolitan cities excluding Mumbai,” she said. . With PTI inputs