The Hindu : APERC to hold hearings on tariff proposals from Feb. 19

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 14, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Andhra Pradesh-Hyderabad

APERC to hold hearings on tariff proposals from Feb. 19

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD Feb. 13. The Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission (APERC) will conduct public hearings on the annual revenue requirement and the tariff proposals for 2003-04 filed by the Transmission Corporation of Andhra Pradesh and the four distribution companies from February 19.

The public hearing for all the petitions received for the Transco and three discoms - APCPDCL, APEPDCL and APNPDCL - will be held at Ravindra Bharati here from Feb. 19 to Feb. 22, while the public hearing with regard to the Southern Power Distribution Company Limited will be held at Srinivasa Auditorium at SVU campus in Tirupati on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25. The Commission this year has received 103 petitions in all before the last date, i.e. Feb. 3 of which 92 objectors wanted their comments/suggestions in person. Though it was programmed to conduct the public hearings at Warangal and Visakhapatnam also, the commission gave up the idea owing to the limited requests received from the APEPDCL and APNPDCL.

Disclosing this to newsmen here on Thursday, the secretary of the APERC, T.B. Narasimha Rao, said that most of the political parties, non-government organisations and farmers' welfare committees evinced keen interest and filed their suggestions/objections before the commission making the public hearing more participatory. Several prominent leaders, including K. Rosaiah and M.V. Mysoora Reddy of the Congress, the State secretary of the CPI (M), B.V. Raghavulu, the CPI State council secretary, S. Sudhakar Reddy, representative of the Lok Satta, S.R. Vijayakar, and Mr Thimma Reddy of the People Monitoring Group were among others who will participate in the public hearings.

However, the APERC secretary evaded replies when asked about the Transco reportedly issuing directives to its employees against their participation in the public hearing. "It is an issue between the Transco management and the employees unions and the commission has a very small role to play in it,'' he said. The commission will seriously take up the petitions filed before it and it feels there is no necessity to intervene in the Transco issue. "Moreover, we have no information about the issue as the unions did not approach the commission. We have received a formal written representation from one of the unions and that too not for a public hearing,'' he said in reply to a volley of questions.

Mr. Rao said that some of the major suggestions and objections that came before the commission were; not to treat the revenue gap as Rs 813.67 crores as projected by the Transco and Discoms for 2002-03 as a regulatory asset; rationalise sale and purchase of power to and from the ferro alloys units; strict implementation of the merit order dispatch and fix reasonable targets of efficiency gain and reduction of the transmission and distribution losses besides ensuring that the expenditures incurred by the utility are prudent. The objectors also termed as unreasonable, unfair and unjust the licensee's proposed pass through mechanism, i.e to permit all the uncontrollable cost increases during the year as a pass through automatically to the extent possible through indexation mechanisms.

He said that the APERC on its part had evolved a code of conduct wherein the objectors were requested not to repeat the issues that were already discussed in writing so as to make the process easier.

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APERC to hold hearings on tariff proposals from Feb. 19