PATIALA: Members of the All India Power Engineers’ Federation (AIPEF) have demanded review of the energy policy with an aim of “integrating unbundled power utilities and restoration of old pension scheme”.

A federal executive meeting of the AIPEF was held in Varanasi on Sunday. The meeting was addressed by chairman Shalinder Dubey, chief patron Padamjit Singh and others.

Spokesperson VK Gupta said that the AIPEF has formed a committee that has representatives of all stakeholders including consumers and power engineers/employees to review the present situation.

“It’s critical as a new government will soon take over and it will be prudent to resolve some of the long standing problems,” he said.

“The most critical of these issues is review of the impact of the Electricity Act, 2003, and an attempt to amend it with the intention of facilitating privatisation of power supply by segregating carriage and content,” he added.

Dubey said that the power supply industry is in deep crisis. On one hand, there is indiscriminate change of legislation and policy resulting in entry of private sector in power and coal mining sectors, thus opening the floodgates to privatisation.

Padamjit Singh said that in order to resolve this crisis, Discoms are being forced to enter into power purchase agreements (PPAs) that in turn will result in huge losses.

“The net result will be that the losses and stress will be shifted from the private to the public sector. All this will result in increase in consumer tariffs,” he said.

“Even at present, the lack of purchasing capacity is restraining universal electrification. Cost of electricity needs to be rationalized through reducing the cost of electricity not merely through increased subsidies. Cost reduction should be brought through standardisation, higher productivity, energy efficiency and reducing the intermediary organisations between production and consumption,” he added.