BJP leader Gopinath Munde, who was the state's deputy chief minister and home minister in the late 1990s, said the hike was likely to be implemented before Diwali.
Adding to the misery of the state's citizens who face daily power cuts of six to 16 hours, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now claims that the state's Congress-Nationalist Congress Party government is all set to hike the power tariff by another 20%.
BJP leader Gopinath Munde, who was the state's deputy chief minister and home minister in the late 1990s, said the hike was likely to be implemented before Diwali.
He said Maharashtra already had the highest power tariff in the country and warned that the BJP would strongly oppose any hike.
Saying the power situation was in a complete mess, he demanded a white paper on the situation. He also wanted chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, who holds the energy portfolio, to announce their plans to overcome the state's massive shortfall of power supply.
Munde said that while it is true that political trouble in Telangana and the floods in Orissa had disrupted supply of coal, leading to shortage of power generation, he said these problems should have been anticipated since both have been taking happening for some years now.
He blamed Pawar for the power current shortage that has forced the government to cut supply for hours.
"The deputy CM's failure is forcing the chief minister to appeal to the people not to take the law into their own hands," he said, referring to the recent spate of attacks on the offices of MSEDC, the utility firm that supplies power.
He warned that the power cuts would harm the state's income. "Power cuts will affect industrial production, which will mean lower revenues. It is, therefore, imperative that the situation be rectified at the earliest," he added, saying the state could buy power from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
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