Bengaluru: Less than six months after the Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission (KERC) approved an average increase in tariff by 30 paise per unit for all electricity supply companies, the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Limited (BESCom) has proposed to the KERC to hike power tariff by Rs. 1.23 to Rs. 1.58 per unit.
All the Escoms submit tariff applications before the KERC every year in December. Though it is not clear how much tariff increase Chamundeshwari Electricity Supply Corporation (CESC) has proposed, the recommended rates are likely to be in the similar range.
After receiving proposals, the KERC will decide on the tariffs and would conduct public hearings before announcing the actual hike.
The tariff hike application will be scrutinised and after acceptance, it will be notified. This is likely to take at least another month. Officials said the proposal is similar to what was made last year also. “It is an annual exercise to submit our proposals seeking revision in power tariff, after which KERC hears the case on why the proposal has been made and then the final announcement is done. KERC usually does not accept the proposal made but does announce an annual revision,” officials said.
Isn’t this like a noose tightening around the neck of citizens that everything is getting out of its reach and becoming so expensive that it has desisted using it anymore? Food items from non-veg to veg have almost equaled in costs. Has there ever been a humble drum stick costing 400 a kilo almost like a kilogram of meat at the butchers? Now people are feeling the same effect when visiting a local vegetable shop, like visiting the butchers. Granted this is due to the incessant rainfall in the recent past, but is there anything else not getting ever expensive with every passing day? Take this electricity, what our parents were paying in a whole year, we are coerced to pay it in a single month, with the same amount of water gushing in our rivers and reservoirs like before. Is there an escape from this madness? Citizens have stopped visiting local doctors and dentists fearing being robbed. Every dentist seems to know just one therapy to a toothache – Root Canal that makes a poor man poorer by seven to eight thousand rupees. Where all it takes is drilling a hole in a tooth and dribbling a drop of clove oil there. Many inefficient diagnostic centers are busy picking people’s pockets with perfunctory test results. Think of a guy like me who visits a doctor with a gall bladder stone and doctor uses an endoscopy procedure with a specialized instrument to view and operate on the internal organs, and he charges me enough with no results. Then I am sent to a certain pathology lab for sonography that turns out to be another nil. It is only a known octogenarian experienced doctor of yesteryears who suspected my gallbladder stone with a mere look and advised the right therapy and I was relieved. So much for the escalating cost and people not getting equal benefits. Looking at the rising graph of food items and facilities in the recent past one can only imagine the escalation of prices of everything beyond his reach than every relaxing to eat and live a normal life again.