DIBRUGARH, June 30 ? An abbreviation most in Assam love to hate these days is the ASEB : the Assam State Electricity Board. Nothing in the ASEB goes down well with the public, even as the Board?s employees are amongst the most pampered of government and semi-government staff in Assam today. Despite their personal financial well-being, these staff members have generally failed to carry out their responsibilities to the satisfaction of the electricity consuming public.
The latest ploy the Board has devised to swindle customers is the ongoing ?load survey? work. By this, the ASEB has reverted to the inspector-raj days, with its men ?inspecting? whether a customer?s premise is overdrawing more than the connected load. Nothing wrong in this, except that while computing the load, these inspectors are sending everyone into a tizzy. Most customers have complained before this correspondent that the ASEB personnel are calculating the load in an erroneous manner. For example, every 5 ampere switch is calculated as a 60 watts load, and a 5 ampere socket as a 100 watts load. Similarly, every 15 ampere socket is calculated as a 1000 watts load and water pumps too as 1000 watts loads. By the way, most private domestic water pumps are the half horsepower varieties, which draw 500 watts of electricity at the most. The ASEB personnel are forcing customers to agree that each switch in a customer?s premise is a load, and this factor is calculated for purposes of the authorised or connected load capacity. Even the most liberal user of electricity will never put on all the switches in his/her premises, but the ASEB inspectors will have none of this.
Matters have not stopped at this. Some of the ASEB personnel have even begun to take matters to ridiculous levels? like making a calculation that an inverter or a voltage stabilizer as a load. If someone installed a 5 kilowatt voltage stabilizer because the ASEB current is far below the stipulated 220 volt rating, these inspectors just take the stabilizer capacity as a load on the ASEB connection. Similarly, a 1 kilowatt inverter is calculated as a load of a similar capacity. Even so, terrorised customers are yet to garner courage to protest this nonsense. However, a senior ASEB engineer this correspondent spoke to said that inverters and stabilizers are not loads on the system. He said this may be a nuisance created by the private electrical contractors, who want to cash in on the prevalent confusion.
While there is serious allegation that impersonators and private electrical contractors are using the situation to make a fast buck, the customer is yet to lodge any protest. This indifference and gullibility are largely responsible for the plight of the latter. All this section of the population want is the Fourth Estate to fight the situation, while they do not even write a ?Letter to the Editor? on a 50 paise post card. Even as the ASEB wants the customer to have his/her documentation correct, nothing has ben done to ensure that the customer receives quality power. Rather, the rule of he day ? this applies throughout Assam ? is to provide highly erratic current, with violent fluctuations in voltage and frequency. Both have enough potential to damage any electrical appliance, with computers being especially vulnerable.
Take the case of the power supplied in the city. The voltage during peak hours drops to absurd 130 volts while the frequency hovers around 45 hertz. Electricity below 47 hertz frequency can instantly damage any computer system. To take care of this, the computer user is forced to spend thousands of rupees on line and voltage correction systems like the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) equipment. Actually, the ASEB should be hauled to the court and slapped with compensation demands for this criminal poor quality of power given to a customer, feels a prominent computer vendor here.
The poor power supply is attributed to faulty maintenance of the load distribution system. While the relevant law states that the distribution system has to be equipped with proper and well-maintained transformers and capacitors, none of this is done. In fact, one does not see capacitors in any of the local load delivery systems anywhere in the State. Capacitors are installed to absorb surges and spikes. In the absence, these power spikes and surges are simply passed on to the customer with the result that refrigerators, computers, fax machines, microwave ovens, TV sets burn out, requiring expensive repairs and even replacement. In the matter of transformer maintenance too, even routine works like topping up of transformer oil is kept pending for months. The result is the high incidence of transformers exploding and burning in Assam today.
A senior engineer of the ASEB revealed that the current load survey work is basically to force customers to apply for higher connection (authorised) loads. This brings in higher revenues to the Board by way of fixed demand charges. Take the example of this city itself. Till April this year, the ASEB was earning Rs 1.5 lakhs monthly by way of fixed demand charges. After the swoopdown, this revenue has now jumped to Rs 9 lakhs a month and is all set to rise further. Domestic customers are charge Rs 15 per kilowatt of connected load as fixed demand charge per billing cycle, while commercial and industrial customers have to pay higher amounts on this score. The best part is that this revenue of the ASEB is a bonus to the Board, and is used to keep the employees of the organisation in good humour. At the cost of the customer!