BHUBANESWAR: Hours after Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik announced at a public meeting that people of Odisha will not have to pay electricity bills from July this year, BJP asked BJD to clear the confusion on the scheme.
Senior BJP leader Samir Mohanty told mediapersons here that the BJD in its manifesto has promised to provide free electricity to domestic households consuming less than 100 units per month while the advertisement published in newspapers states electricity will be free from July and 90 per cent households in the state will benefit from the scheme.
“This is another attempt to confuse people before elections by the BJD government which has been cheating them for the last 24 years. There are 96 lakh electricity consumers in the state. The BJD must clarify if the free electricity scheme will be applicable to all consumers or only those who consume less than 100 units per month,” he said.
The BJD thought of providing free electricity to a section of consumers only after 24 years even as governments of 27 states in the country have been providing the subsidy to the sector all these years to relieve the burden on their consumers. Odisha being a coal-bearing state, the consumers here pay more power tariff than the national average. The average cost per unit of power in Odisha is Rs 5.90 which is 90 paise more than the national average, he said.
Mohanty came down on the state government for allowing Tamil Nadu to procure 1,500 MW power from the pit head of 3,200 MW thermal power plant of NCL at Talabira in Sundargarh district at a cheaper rate. While the cost of power from the thermal power plant to Odisha is Rs 2.83 per unit, cost of power supplied to Tamil Nadu is fixed at Rs 2.53 per unit. “Why is the state government protecting the interests of the consumers in Tamil Nadu at the cost of its own people?” he asked.