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Sukhbir-Kalia have done their
job, but will farmers pay?
WSN Bureau
Chandigarh: On
the face of it, the Sukhbir Singh Badal-Manoranjan Kalia committee
has claimed it has not disturbed the subsidies being given to
farmers. But in reality, the farm sector has been dealt a bad blow.
Now, Punjab
State Electricity Board will get 18 pc of power bills from farmers,
while the rest 82 pc will be paid for by the government. Earlier,
all power was free for farmers.
While trying to
bridge the rural-urban divide between the ruling allies, the
two-member committee of Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal and
Industries Minister Manoranjan Kalia has proposed widening of tax
net on the urban sector — BJP’s core constituency — but not without
hitting at the votebank of Akali Dal too.
Though
sugarcoated as productivity bonus that is to be paid to farmers
during rabi and kharif seasons, the formula of charging farmers Rs
50 per brake horse power (bhp) is clearly an indication that farmers
will have to pay for the power they use.
However, the big
question is whether the farmers will pay to the PSEB and whether the
government, which has been consistently defaulting on payment of
power subsidy to the board, will have the money to reimburse
farmers.
This partial
withdrawal of subsidies has been proposed by the Sukhbir-Kalia
committee as a requirement to avail of funds from international
bodies, such as World Bank, and help farmers get a higher minimum
support price (MSP) for crops, as free power is not factored in as
input cost by the Agricultural Costs and Prices Commission (ACPC).
But what it does
not reveal, reported the Indian Express, is that it was also a
political and economic compulsion. The government clearly knows that
the state has reached a point where it cannot afford to foot huge
subsidies. The productivity bonus is only to make the farmers start
paying. There will never be money to reimburse lakhs of farmers on
the basis of their power usage. The idea is not practical.
The panel’s
recommendation of charging Rs 50 per bhp is just to recover part of
the power bill from farmers and is not likely to impact the
agricultural consumption figure and transmission and distribution
(T&D) losses shown by the power board.
Since nearly 93
per cent of the total nearly 11 lakh tubewells in the state are not
metered, the farmers are charged on the basis of tubewell load
rather than meter readings. Therefore, agricultural consumption of
power remains the most contentious issue between the PSEB and the
regulatory commission. The PSEB projects its free power figures
based on sample meters that cover just seven per cent of the total
number of tubewells in the state. The regulator has been asking the
board to take the sample size to at least 10 per cent. Since PSEB’s
projections on free power directly impact the T&D losses, the
board’s figure was slashed by 10 per cent in its 2009-10 tariff
petition after a survey done by an independent agency.
27
January 2010
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