PANJIM: The State cabinet on Wednesday granted relief to over 5.60 lakh power consumers, when it decided not to burden consumers with an additional tariff hike this financial year till March 31, 2022 and instead pass on the subsidy to tune of Rs 120 crore to nullify its impact.
The proposal before the cabinet was either to implement the tariff order, issued by the Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission (JERC) for the Financial Year 2021-22 in full or to keep it in abeyance for the period from April 1, 2021 to March 31, next year.
Addressing media persons post the Cabinet meeting, Chief Minister Dr Pramod Sawant said that the Cabinet decided to keep in abeyance the tariff order for the financial year except for levy of tariff of Rs 3.50 per unit as per consumer category ‘Electric Vehicle Charging Station’.
The JERC tariff order for the FY 2020-21, dated May 19, 2020 had approved a hike of around 5.31 per cent, which was to be implemented from June 1, 2020 onwards but could not be so done due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and was supposed to be implemented this financial year.
Further, the cabinet decided to implement kVAh based tariff for HT/EHT categories and to grant subsidy to all categories of consumers to nullify the impact of hike in tariff order for 2021-22 issued by JERC.
“State will have an additional burden of Rs 120 crore in the form of subsidy to power consumers,” Sawant said.
The State has around 5.64 lakh consumers, who will benefit from the decision.
Last year too, the government had decided to grant a subsidy to all categories of consumers to nullify the impact of tariff hike and to continue with the tariff approved for FY 2019-20. As such, with Wednesday’s cabinet decision, the tariff order of 2019-20 continues to remain in force.
