The recently released report on the performance of DISCOs by the National Electric and Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) seems to be an exercise in futility. Sticking to their past indiscretions, the DISCOs have once again made a mockery of the regulator by providing incorrect data.
Indeed, the brashness with which distribution companies have conjured up completely baseless figures for submission to the regulator is reflective of NEPRAs continued helplessness in the matter.
Due to fake reporting NEPRA only considered four parameters for its annual performance ranking of DISCOs which include T&D losses, recovery, time frame for new connections and safety. Similar to the previous year, IESCO came out to be the best performing DISCO with GEPCO and MEPCO being the runner-ups.
Even in parameters such as recovery and T&D losses, the results are far from ideal with DISCOs and K-Electric contributing a staggering Rs49 billion and Rs83 billion loss in each category respectively. Unsurprisingly, it was only IESCO which met NEPRAs targets in these categories whereas SEPCO continued to be the worst performing DISCO in the country.
Readers of the report can get a good laugh upon reaching the load-shedding section of the report. Data provided to the regulator showed that DISCOs and K-Electric do only 1 to 4 hours of load shedding, which NEPRA notes as “far away from ground realities.
“ In its visit of different DISCOs, the regulator actually found load shedding to be 8 to 10 hours in urban and 10 to 12 hours in rural areas.
DISCOs also chose to remain ignorant in submitting correct data for consumer complaints, which were based on completely unrealistic factual positions. Other parameters that NEPRA did not take into account due to data manipulation included nominal voltage, fault rate and SAIFI, which is the average number of times that customers experience outages in a given year.
It is a matter of great concern that DISCOs are comfortable with data manipulation and fake reporting. And why won’t they be? Ultimately, all of them come under the control of the Ministry of Water and Power (MoWP), which has had an increasingly stressful relationship with the power sector regulator.
The Ministry itself leads from example and chooses not to release data for the regulator in a timely and accurate manner including data for NEPRA’s annual State of the Industry Report as well as daily generation data.
This column does not see any silver linings when it comes to the management and operational performance of DISCOs in the foreseeable future.
The recent attempts of bringing them further away from regulatory oversight by amending the NEPRA Act speak volumes for the government’s plans to keep a major presence in the distribution sector.
Rendering the regulator toothless while covering up the abysmal performance of DISCOs is reflective of the generally worrisome state of affairs in the power sector.
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