In a bid to attract investments, the Maharashtra government is coming up with a plan to rationalise power tariff exclusively for industry consumer.According to chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, the industrial consumers are paying "significantly high" , Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on Thursday.
Currently, out of the over 2.20 crore consumers of the state utility Mahavitaran, 1.99 per cent or about 4.38 lakh are industrial customers with consumption of 31,352.44 million units. Mahavitaran charges them Rs 8-8.50 per unit."Currently, the tariffs for industrial consumers are significantly high. If we have to attract industries to the state, we will have to develop a mechanism to rationalise these tariffs," Fadnavis said.
The state provides subsidy to Mahavitaran which in-turn subsidises its low-end consumers, including farmers, who form a large part of its customer base. Currently, Mahavitaran has 1.62 crore residential and 36.67 lakh agricultural consumers, among others.However, he refused to fix the amount of tariff reduction, however, the Chief Minister said, “We are preparing a road-map to rationalise the power tariffs.”The government is planing to visit MERC with a proposal to reduce the tariff, without going to the problem of offering subsidy, he pointed out.
