BHUBANESWAR: Even as Tata Power claimed to have reduced the aggregated technical and commercial (AT&C) loss by 16 per cent (pc) in the first year of operation of the Tata Power Central Odisha Distribution Ltd (TPCODL), the actual loss reduction was less than one pc.
Performance review of the TPCODL from April 2020 to March 2021 showed that the new management was able to bring down the overall AT&C loss from 30.44 pc during the same period in 2019-20 to only 29.54 pc against the OERC benchmark of 23.77 pc.
Tata Power Company Limited (TPCL), a subsidiary of the Tata Group, took over the management of the erstwhile Central Electricity Supply Utility (CESU) from June 1, 2020. On completion of one year of takeover of CESU, top executives of the TPCODL told the media that the company had been able to arrest the loss level from over 40 pc to 24 pc.
Contrary to the TPCODL claim of improved performance in the first year, the distribution loss had shown a rising trend. While the distribution loss was 23.15 pc as on March 31, 2020, it increased by 2.75 pc to 25.9 pc by March 31, 2021.
Similarly, the billing efficiency of the company decreased by 2.75 pc during the same period from 76.85 pc to 74.10 pc. Billing efficiency is an indicator of proportion of energy that has been billed (includes both metered and unmetered sales) to consumers against energy supplied to an area.
Expressing displeasure over the reduction in billing efficiency compared to previous year, OERC asked TPCODL to find out the reason behind drop in the billing efficiency of central distribution division (CDD-II) by 5 pc compared to 2019-20.
The distribution utility, however, had registered a 4.58 pc growth in the billing efficiency from 90.51 pc to 95 pc. In response to action taken for improvement of increasing billing efficiency, TPCODL said that it has introduced Reading Request Intimation (RRI) pasting on premises to reduce house lock cases and has replaced month end billing concept with continuous billing and invoicing.