Report of Indian Institute of Public Administration ... - Ministry of Power

Anti-Theft Measures
State Reports (Vol.-III)
Study on `Impact of Restructuring of SEBs’
For prevention of electricity theft, the State Government notified the Madhya Pradesh
Urja Adhiniyam on 17 April, 2001. Several administrative measures undertaken by
the companies to check power theft include: strengthening of the Vigilance Squads,
replacing bare low tension (LT) conductors by armored cables/HT lines and setting up
of special courts (92 Nos.) for speedy trial of electricity theft cases. Work of energy
audit up to division level and also in some big cities and towns has been started to
identify theft prone areas.
Enforcement measures for elimination of cases of theft of electricity have slowed
down in the State. During 2002-03, 3,700 FIRs were lodged and an amount of Rs
61.33 crore was realised. These preventive measures seem to have created an impact,
but subsequently the number of FIRs lodged has come down. 1,607 FIRs were lodged
in 2003-04 and 522, in 2004-05 and the recoveries from such cases declined from 78
to 75.8 per cent of the demand raised.
Recovery of Cost of supply
The Average Cost of Supply (ACS) and Average Revenue Realised (ARR) across
various categories of consumers in the State depict that the ACS is increasing at an
annual rate of around 10 per cent taking 1998-99 as the base year. While MPERC, in
its tariff order for FY 2006-07, has projected a marginal gap of around Rs 9.51 crore
(for the three DISCOMs combined), the ARR-ACS analysis for MPSEB for the year
2003-04 indicates a revenue gap of around 96 paise per unit. This would call for
further rebalancing of the tariffs and/or greater thrust on preventing of electricity theft
and AT&C loss reduction efforts by the DISCOMs.
Information Technology Initiatives
Information Technology (IT) initiatives in the DISCOMs have remained limited
which has been attributed to financial crunch and shortage of technical staff and
modern office equipment to manage the IT applications. It is imperative that Utilities
encourage the adoption of IT in the field of Geographical Information System (GIS)
and Consumer Indexing, metering, data acquisition and management, assets
management and customer services. It has developed in-house IT enabled revenue
management system (RMS), which is being introduced in phases and, in the first
instance, Information Technology (IT) enabled RMS package has been implemented
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