Chief minister has not paid his power bills

The Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport Undertaking (BEST), which has recently increased the electricity charges to off-set losses of its transport arm, has some prominent people who have not paid up and disturbed its balance sheet. These prominent people are 29 ministers, who have not paid electricity bill amounting to Rs62 lakh as on March 2013.

These revelations were made after Chetan Kothari filed an RTI plea to know their power bill dues. Of the Rs62 lakh that is payable, Rs52 lakh is for the bills before the month of March. The bill period of each of their bills varies but most of the bill dates were in March.

As per the details, the maximum amount due is from chief minister’s bungalow Varsha.

While the total due was Rs 6.64 lakh, the arrears before March was Rs5.85 lakh. The second in line is the PWD bungalow that has total outstanding of Rs6.28 lakh with Rs5.28 lakh as arrears before March. Third highest arrear is from the bungalow, Ramtek, which is occupied by Chhagan Bhujbal. The outstanding before March for Ramtek is Rs5.47 lakh.

The least arrears payable in the list of 29 ministers is from Jayadatta Kshirsagar whose bungalow Satpuda has only Rs45,879 as net amount payable.

Apart from the arrears, the RTI query has also revealed how much energy was consumed until March . For the month of March, the most energy was consumed by Jayadatta Kshirsagar’s bungalow whose March bill was over Rs 80,000.

The second in line was the CM’s bungalow whose bill amounts to Rs76,043. Balasahen Thorat’s bungalow was the third to use most electricity with bill up to Rs74,717.

When contacted about the action taken by BEST to recover the money form the ministers, Virendra Bagul, PRO of the undertaking said, “I cannot comment on this. This is a policy question and the PRO cannot answer this.”

Shrikant Khedkar, deputy general manager of BEST, said, “I will have to confirm this. We are normally sending notices to people who have not paid their dues. In this case we cannot take any drastic step. But we have sent notices to PWD and they should be clearing it soon. We are following it up with them.”

Balasaheb Thorat said, “The bill normally does not come to us and is paid by the government so I cannot comment on this.”  Public relations officer of the CM, Chhagan Bhujbal, and Jayadatta Kshirsagar did not respond. Shyamalkumar Mukherjee, secretary of the PWD, said, “Please talk to our engineer at the presidency division.”

Kishore Patil, executive engineer of the presidency division, said: “We have cleared the bill till February. The latest bill has just come to us which we will clear soon.”

Satish Lalit, public relations officer to the CM, said, “Arrears would have reflected because bill goes to various departments. Recently we have cleared all the bills.”