Senior committee members of the Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking has demanded compensation from Tata Power for the loss in revenue incurred due to the state wide power outage on October 12.
Ravi Raja, senior Congress corporator and BEST management Committee member stated that every month BEST earns an average revenue of around Rs 2,500 crores from electricity distribution. He claimed that on October 12, BEST has suffered a loss of Rs 15 crores due to the power breakdown.
"BEST is a distributor of electricity and the eight-hour power outage on October 12 had caused huge revenue loss to the undertaking. The outage was the fault of the Tata power and they will have to pay the compensation" Raja told FPJ.
Raja's proposal was also backed by other members of the committee as well. Senior Congress corporator and BEST management Committee member - Bhushan Patil stated that BEST is already under huge losses and Tata needs to compensate for the losses.
"BEST is facing a severe cash crunch and at the same time providing cheap transport service to the people. The revenue loss has pushed the industry in an adverse manner" stated Patil.
Senior BEST officials had acknowledged the demand and mentioned that the issue will be raised by them once the investigation report comes out.
"The government has initiated an inquiry on the power failure incident and the report is yet to be out. Once the report is out we will put the demand to the state government" stated a senior BEST official.
Meanwhile, the BEST undertaking on Friday has announced schemes for its consumers in order to encourage early bill payment.
In a statement BEST stated, if consumers pay the bill of November immediately then they will receive 2 percent rebate on the bills paid between April and September.
And incase the November bill is paid in installments then customers will receive a rebate of 1 per cent on the bills of the said months.
