The Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) has sought government intervention to rationalise the fees being levied by the Kerala State Electricity Regulatory Commission (KSERC) under various heads to ease its fiscal strain and avert the chances of shifting the burden to the public.
The board being the only largest public utility or licencee in the State, is now being forced to cough up substantial sums for licence renewal, truing up petition filing fees, approval of tariff revision petition and such others regularly.
The resource-starved board is scraping the bottom of the barrel for footing its committed expenditure, including salary, payments due to contractors and others. It is heavily dependent on the borrowings from banks and other financial institutions. The present revenue gap has been pegged at ₹500 crore and has loans for ₹6,000 crore.
Despite the mounting commitments, the board is drawing power from all available sources and distributing it. The soaring demand that has resulted in an increase in business volume and revenue is costing it dearly.
The fees rates levied by the commission are not proportionate to its expenses, but are directly linked to the revenue of the licencee. Given the volume of the purchase and distribution, the board is the worst-hit by the alleged disparity in fee rates.
Board chairman N.S. Pillai, in a letter to the government, pointed out that the commission had a huge corpus and the accumulation of the surplus over the years could be attributed to the high fees collected for all petitions filed by the board from time to time.
He cited the commission’s annual report for 2018-19 as a case in point. The commission has a corpus of ₹40.75 crore and 96% of the funds have been parked as fixed and other deposits. The revenue expenditure of the commission is well below 50% of its income. Against an expenditure of ₹3.06 crore for 2018-19, it has fixed deposits for ₹39.38 crore. It has adequate funds at its disposal to meet its expenses for the next 10 years, while the board is operating on a shoe-string budget.
Hence, the board said that there was ample leeway for rationalising the fee structure keeping in mind the fund requirements of the commission and urged the government to sort out the issue in consultation with the commission.
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