Power engineers protest unbundling of PSEB
Attar Singh
Tribune News Service

Patiala, September 12
On the call of the PSEB Engineers Association, engineers from all over Punjab held a rally against state government’s move to unbundle the PSEB without taking stakeholders, particularly, engineers into confidence.

The engineers appreciated the efforts of the Chief Minister of Punjab in getting the unbundling date extended by three months but regretted that although orders to this effect were issued on September 4 by the central government, the same was not communicated to the political leadership and the public by the state bureaucracy resulting in unfortunate incidents on September 8 at Chandigarh, that led to the death of a young man and damaging of public property.

A spokesman of the PSEB Engineers Association said the statements of the Chief Minister indicate that political leadership intends to just comply with the provisions of the Electricity Act 2003. For compliance of the Act, the association reiterated that Appellate Tribunal for Electricity in its judgment of July 15,2009 had held that it is permissible under the Act to retain generation, transmission and distribution under one composite company. For the purpose of trading only a separate company would be required. So the PSEB can be converted in to one company as had been done by the Kerala government.

However, the move of the bureaucracy to create four companies by separating functions of generation, transmission and distribution would be suicidal for the state since in a scenario of power shortage, the major objective is the optimum utilisation of available power generation capacity. Since Power generated cannot be stored, it is necessary to match the power generation with demand on minute-to-minute basis, with the transmission system acting as the carrier.

The restructuring or unbundling of PSEB is a high risk, low return and irreversible process which cannot be undertaken without clear objectives and the capacity to bear huge financial cost during transition period. Total financial burden on the state government due to restructuring of the PSEB would be huge keeping in view the present annual subsidy bill of over Rs 3,000 crore and accumulated losses of over Rs 8,000 crore.

Without clean balance sheets, restructuring would be meaningless and futile. The association demanded that the state government should issue a detail policy statement elaborating its objectives and proposed model of reforms for open public debate. The period of three months must be utilised to create consensus amongst all stakeholders, which is essential for the success of any reforms process.