Big shots ignore bills

Hyderabad: The list of defaulters of electricity consumers is constantly increasing with a large chunk of them being government departments and industrial consumers, say officials. Some of the city’s bigwigs are named in the list of defaulters as well. In the list is the official residence of former CM Chandrababu Naidu and some of the dues have been pending since a decade. The state government departments have dues to the tune of Rs 2000 crore. The list of defaulters include important government offices like executive officer Cantonment, circle inspector of police Bowenpally, Registrar AP and Administrative Tribunal Charminar. There are also several connections in the names of Mandal Revenue Offices (MROs) and around 4000 government connections in the names of various sarpanchs.

Interestingly, a single connection in the name of sarpanch of Atmakur has dues of over Rs 2 lakh. The outstanding dues for Mr Chandrababu Naidu’s residence stood at Rs 3.6 lakh last month. Government departments currently owe a total of Rs 2,000 crore (across Discoms). Among the top defaulters are the irrigation department, panchayati raj, municipal administration, water board and GHMC. All of them have been sent notices. Seventy per cent of the defaulters are government departments. A total of 15 departments have pending bills, which, along with their arrears, run into close to Rs 2, 000 crore. The departments have been directed to pay their dues by the end of February or face disconnection. While the Central Discom has adopted the method of making the defaulters’ information public by posting the list of defaulters with huge dues on its website, there has been a little reduction in individual defaulters.

“We have tried several methods to ensure that government departments pay their bills but since government offices have the upper hand in dealing with bill payment issues, we hardly get the recovery and in most cases, on sending notices, only a small amount is paid. In the case of industries, most of the dues are the FSA and penalty amounts imposed in the recent past due to overdrawing of power,” said a senior official from the Central Discom. There are over 15,000 defaulters in the list who owe more than Rs 50,000 while close to 50,000 defaulters have dues of over Rs 25,000.