CESU Deadline Ends Today, Commercial Consumers On Tomorrow’s Power Disconnection Drive Hit-List

Bhubaneswar:  With the deadline for depositing pending bills ending on Wednesday, The Central Electricity Supply Utility (CESU) is all set to begin its power disconnection drive from Thursday in a phased manner.

With the opposition BJP and Congress training guns at CESU over its earlier notice on power disconnection in 11,397 villages, senior general manager Manoj Singh on Wednesday said that power supply to commercial consumers and domestic ones, who have withheld the payment deliberately despite having the capability to pay the bills, will be terminated in the first phase.

The second phase will focus on affluent and high value domestic consumers with huge outstanding arrears. It will include high load domestic consumers having multi-storey houses, air conditioners and four wheelers. Those who pay income tax but do not clear their electricity dues will also be included in the list. In the third phase, all other consumers will be covered. It will specially focus on consumers who have not paid electricity dues for years together, a CESU press release had earlier said.

A total of 413 squads have been formed to carry out the power disconnection exercise in nine coastal districts  – Khurda, Nayagarh, Puri, Cuttack, Dhenkanal, Angul, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara and a part of Jajpur district – under the jurisdiction of CESU

Notably, the power distribution company had a pending arrear of Rs 1,971 crore to be collected from more than 7 lakh consumers by November 2019. In December 2019 last year, it had announced the arrear collection-cum-disconnection drive from January 16.

In the past one month, 1,10,000 subscribers had cleared pending bills amounting to almost Rs 21 crore.

With 8,95,459 being served notices, the CESU had earlier said that power supply to those consumers who pay up 30 per cent of the pending bills by January 16 will not be disconnected.