UP has 84L ‘katiya’ connection houses
LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh has as many as 84 lakh households drawing electricity through ‘katiyas’ (illegal electricity connection), making it one of the highest power theft-prone states in the country.
The number is 22% of the total 3.82 crore households and nearly 50% of the legal electricity connections in the state.
The UP Power Corporation Ltd (UPPCL) has admitted to this anomaly in official records. However, in UPPCL terms ‘katiyas’ as ‘unformalised’ electricity connections — connections that are neither metered nor exist in ledger records.
“We have found 84 lakh households using electricity even though they have not taken formal connection, which means they are using katias to draw electricity,” principal secretary, energy and UPPCL chairman Alok Kumar said.
During a review of Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY) in Delhi by the Union power ministry last month, it was noted that only 45% households in UP had formal connections and out of them only 27% households had metered connections as of March 2017.
Of the 3.82 crore households, 1.27 crore, that is 33%, did not have electricity connection while only 1.02 crore or 27% of the total formal connections had metered supply and 68 lakh, that is 18%, enjoyed unmetered power consumption against fixed monthly charges.
But the real ‘shocker’ was the fact a large number of ‘katiyas’, 84 lakh statewide, as per a conservative survey, were being used without fear of being caught, negatively contributing to the aggregate transmission and commercial (AT&C losses) of discoms.
“In financial year 2017, there were about 68 lakh unmetered but formalized domestic connections out of the total 170 lakh domestic connections and another 84 lakh unformalised connections (katiyas) that are drawing electricity but need to be formalized and metered,” a presentation at the UDAY meeting said. Meerut and Varanasi discoms were found to be having the highest unmetered connections.
Little wonders that AT&C losses (largely theft of electricity) are among the highest in UP at 29% and significantly higher than the national average of 24.1% against the UDAY target of 20.63% in the review year.
According to a letter sent by Kumar to all discom MDs expressing concern over rampant theft of electricity, 51 of the 145 electricity divisions with losses above 40% were in UP alone.
It has been found that a gap between the average cost of supply and the average revenue realized in UP has gone up from 41 paise per unit in 2017 to 86 paise per unit in 2018 despite reduction in cost of power by 14 paise per unit, thus increasing the UPPCL’s overall deficit. Presence of a large number of ‘katiyas’ and unmetered connections is said to be a major reason for the bad financial health of discoms in UP.
Kumar said all efforts were being made to issue formal connections to premises that did not have one or run on illegal connections. “We have a target of connecting each and every household to a formal electricity connection by March 2019 and action is being taken on a warfooting in this direction,” he claimed.