Margao: Two months after the electricity department withdrew penalties levied on consumers for exceeding their sanctioned load, complaints of inflated power bills continue to pour in, with officials now attributing the spike squarely to a steep tariff hike ordered by the Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission (JERC).Department officials clarified that the unusually high bills currently being received have nothing to do with the penalties that had triggered public outrage earlier. All consumers who were slapped with penal charges for surplus demand have already been issued revised bills with the deductions reflected, they said, and no fresh penalties have been imposed since.Ruby Gomes (name changed on request), a resident of a building in Arlem, Fatorda, said her family was among the many left stunned by the sudden jump in billing amounts. “My mother, who stays in the nearby flat, was shocked to get a bill for Rs 10,000 when she used to pay an average of Rs 3,000 every month. I usually got bills of Rs 1,500-1,700, but this time it crossed Rs 6,000. My consumption certainly hasn’t gone up that much, and even after accounting for the tariff hike, the bills simply cannot shoot through the roof like this — we know how to calculate too,” she said. Gomes added that several residents in her building had received similarly excessive bills and many had not paid them, unable to afford the amounts. “We complained to the department, but their stock reply is that our consumption has increased and the tariff has been hiked. That explanation is simply not acceptable,” she said.Superintending engineer of the electricity department, Rajiv Samant, said the penalty issue had been fully resolved after govt’s intervention. “The penalties levied for surplus demand were waived off following instructions from govt, and revised bills were issued to all subscribers who had been penalised. No penal charges have been levied on any subscriber since,” he said.Samant explained that the current spike in bills was purely a function of consumption and tariff. “Consumers are billed as per the units they consume — when consumption is higher, the bill is higher. On top of that, the tariff fixed by JERC has been hiked twice within seven months, first in Oct 2025 and again in April 2026, which has led to a steep cumulative increase. JERC has also finalised tariffs up to 2030, a fact most people are unaware of. There is also the FPPCA charge, which is linked to consumption as well,” he said.He added that billing is structured in slabs of 100 units each, and the impact of the tariff hike becomes disproportionately sharper as consumption rises. The controversy over penal charges had first erupted in June, when state govt, following a public backlash, decided to waive penalties imposed on consumers for drawing power beyond their sanctioned load.Reacting to the continuing complaints, power minister Sudin Dhavalikar said he had received several grievances regarding excess bills, with some MLAs also expected to raise the issue through legislative assembly questions (LAQs) in the forthcoming session. “I will give replies to the LAQs that have been raised. But if people are still getting high bills, they should approach the offices of the assistant engineers or executive engineers and get them verified and corrected. I have already instructed the chief engineer accordingly. If there has been an error in computation and the bill has already been paid, the amount will be adjusted in the following month’s bill,” he said.Dhavalikar, however, said a reduction in tariff was not something that could be decided unilaterally or immediately. “If people still find the bills too high, the only solution available to us is to lower the tariff. But I cannot do that right away, since such a decision has financial implications and would also require approval from JERC and central govt. I will need to take up the matter with the chief minister, because whatever extent we lower the tariff by, that amount will have to be provided for in the state budget,” he said.
