Politics will always prevail over economics. This has been proved once again. Notwithstanding opposition from economists to free power for agriculture, the political bosses in Andhra Pradesh, irrespective of their affiliation, are in a hurry to campaign for the concept of ‘free power’.
While Telugu Desam Party?s Chandrababu Naidu, who was against free power during his tenure, proposes to supply free power for nine hours to the farm sector, other parties like the BJP vow to provide free power for 12 hours. Interestingly, chief minister Rajasekhara Reddy, who actually introduced the scheme, now claims that his government is giving free power as required by the farmers. At present, the government is supplying power for seven hours during agricultural operations.
The issue was raised when the government announced that it proposed to install meters at the transformer-level to assess power consumption in the agriculture sector. This is required as the government is expected to pay the power cost to the distributing companies, as per the orders of AP Electricity Regulatory Commission.
As per rough estimates, AP has over 25 lakh agriculture connections. However, most of these are not registered. According to sources, about 47% of power supplied is not billed and is shown as agriculture usage. However, farmer associations argue that only 20% of the power supplied is being consumed for pumping water. The remaining 27% should, therefore, be booked under theft and transmission losses.
Recently, the chief minister announced that the government was willing to regularise all illegal agriculture connections. ??We are ready to supply power to all those eligible, but they have to get regularisation by paying Rs 1,000 per connection,?? Reddy said.
Officials said there are over two lakh illegal connections that need to be regularised. Even funding agencies, like World Bank, are now accepting the ‘free power’ model being adopted by AP. Finance department officials said funding agencies now do not consider free power a bad word. In fact, the state is receiving funds from these institutions, they said.