Nirupam on strike, wants 'substantial reduction' in Mumbai's power tariff

Mumbai: Arvind Kejriwal holds no monopoly over Gandhi’s satyagraha, Congress Member of Parliament Sanjay Nirupam said on Thursday, an hour or so into his indefinite hunger strike demanding a reduction in electricity tariff for suburban Mumbai consumers.

“This is the land of protests, history has seen many satyagrahas and dharnas before Kejriwal. We have used this peaceful protest to oust the British, who are these people,” Nirupam asked, sitting on a stage erected on the pavement right outside Reliance Energy Ltd’s subdivisional office at Kandivli (West).

His demands: REL must roll back its fixed charges, wheeling charges and retail asset charge, in order to reduce the prospective subsidy bill the government will be left with if Mumbaiites are to get a power bill reduction in the wake of the Aam Aadmi Party’s largesse in Delhi.

The Maharashtra state government announced last week that power tariff across Maharashtra would be slashed by 20 percent, except in Mumbai. There are 20-odd lakh residential power consumers in Mumbai.

Nirupam has been pursuing the issue since the start of the new year, having written to Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan first about the issue on 1 January.

“The Chief Minister of Delhi has announced a fifty percent cut in power tariff effective from 1 January 2014 for consumption up to 400 units. This decision will directly benefit lacs of middleclass people and slumdwellers in a big way,” he started his letter.

There is possible cartelisation, he pointed out and added, “…if this legitimate expectation… is not met in the immediate future we will be constrained to launch a massive agitation against our own government to press for substantial reduction in power tariff.”

Continuing in the recent tradition of Congress Parliamentarians picking the trusty dharna as a method to negotiate with their own party’s state government (remember Milind Deora on dharna at the Campa Cola buildings in Worli?) Nirupam took on Reliance Energy Ltd and the state government in near-equal measure.

“The way these companies work is that they fix people in government offices and then exploit consumers.” He alleged there was collusion between officials of power regulator MERC and the private power companies and said the MERC had become a “dumping ground” to rehabilitate retired officials and bureaucrats with no technical understanding of electricity generation, distribution or pricing.

Incidentally, only last week, Nirupam advised Kejriwal to focus on governance and not indulge in drama. Issues can be negotiated with the government, he had said.