File photo of Awais Leghari
Power Minister Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari on Thursday acknowledged that distribution companies were collecting “crores of rupees” through overbilling every month, adding this included the domestic and agriculture sectors.
Addressing a press conference, he said farmers who had shifted their tube-wells to solar power were still receiving millions of rupees in electricity bills, stressing this was unacceptable. He lamented that apart from electricity thieves, officers and staff of his ministry and its subsidiaries were also causing around Rs. 560 billion in annual losses to the exchequer. Vowing to end this practice, he stressed it was causing irreparable harm to the economy.
According to Leghari, distribution companies were losing Rs. 200 billion in unrecovered bills, while Rs. 360 billion was being lost to theft facilitated by “our officers and staff.” Warning that the government would act against such officials, he stressed that this could not be avoided through protests or blackmail tactics. “This is an essential service,” he said, noting he had been threatened by officials that they would not permit fresh inductions to replace corrupt officials. “There’s no dearth of fresh engineers who have the relevant qualifications and can be trained to take over assignments,” he noted.
The minister said DISCOs staff had until April 23 to survey their respective areas and jurisdictions and remove all illegal electricity connections. If they failed to do so, he warned, the government would send special teams and FIA officials to act against the staff.
Noting problems within his own ministry, he said officials were unaware how many faulty meters were causing losses. He said the Power Division had initially informed him there were 100,000 defective meters nationwide but when he had questioned if this meant all others were working properly, he was told they did not know.
Stressing the new government had prepared a roadmap for power sector reforms that would soon be made public, he said it aimed to control power pilferage, overbilling, and the circular debt. To questions, he said the circular debt had reached Rs. 2.5 trillion, while Rs. 1.9 trillion in bills were outstanding.
On a question about declining electricity demand, Leghari said the government was considering rate reductions for industrial consumers and other incentives to encourage higher power usage. He said around 6,800MW of solar panels were imported thus far this year, with only 700MW of these adopting net-metering. The rest, he said, had opted to go off-grid. “We are seriously thinking about this,” he said, hinting at a revamp of the solar net metering mechanism.