Govt, BSES execs to talk it out next week

NEW DELHI: The Delhi government and the BSES discoms will have a detailed discussion on the capital's power distribution system next week. Responding to the letter sent by Delhi's power secretary last week, BSES, according to sources, said that top officials would meet power minister Satyendar Jain, with BSES chairman Lalit Jalan, and not Reliance ADA group chairperson Anil Ambani, representing the two discoms at the meeting.
Last week, power secretary Sukesh Jain attacked the BSES discoms and alleged inefficiency, mismanagement, corruption and financial mismanagement. Jain's scathing letter to Anil Ambani talked of the performance of his group's power distribution companies in Delhi and asked the industrialist to come for a meeting with a concrete road-map on how it will improve its operations. In his letter, Jain said the performance of BSES so far had been atrocious and the two discoms had failed to meet the standards expected of them after they took over power distribution in the capital 14 years ago.
TOI has learnt that the two Reliance companies, BSES Rajdhani and BSES Yamuna, have blamed transmission constraints in their response, while pointing out that they had actually brought down energy loss levels from 55% to 13% in the city. The letter also mentions BSES's "acknowledged regulatory assets of Rs 16,000 cr", which has contributed to the distribution firms' financial problems and inability to pay electricity generating companies on time.
"The discoms made a case on why outages were happening in certain pockets of the city, contained mostly to unauthorised colonies, JJ clusters, slums and villages," said a source, perhaps addressing chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's concern that this category of users were being provided deficient service. The discoms claimed that power theft was prevalent in these colonies even as unauthorised construction affected regular power supply. Allegations of financial irregularities, siphoning of funds and corruption were vehemently denied in the response.
Sources said that in the letter, BSES has pointed out several problems in augmenting network in theft-prone areas. "In many of these areas, the two discoms said they did not have access to land for improving network despite requests to the government," informed a source.
Jain refuted allegations that the capital's transmission work was inadequate. "The reliability of Delhi Transco's transmission network is the best in the country. We have no shortage of power and even during peak power demands, we maintain a surplus of 1,000 MW,'' he said on Wednesday.