Amaravati: Andhra Pradesh government has announced that it is going to increase the supply of power from seven hours to nine hours to farmers. But the issue worrying the officials from the department is how are they going to procure it? How will the government allocate funds for it?

This is a stunt to gain votes in the upcoming elections even though the TDP government has no clarity over how much electricity is needed for delivering nine hours of supply.

TDP have been boasting that they are providing power for seven hours in the past four years. But a quick check reveals that they have not even supplied power for the half the amount of time promised.

All the cost incurred for providing power to the agriculture should be paid as subsidy amount to the power distribution companies. Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission has submitted in the recent 2019-20 report that the government is short of Rs 8000 crores. The farm subsidy amounts to Rs 7000 crores, and how much is the government going to pay is not yet to be known. The proposal on the rise in the price for extending the time from seven hours to nine hours has not even been sent to the board.

Andhra Pradesh has a total of 17,00,000 farm based electricity connections. Each water pump set (5HP) needs 5 units of power to run for an hour, which makes it 35 units per day, for seven hours. A total of 59 million units is required to supply power to 17,00,000 lakh pump sets per day, but in reality, the supplied power is 10,831.44 million units per annum. That is only 29.69 million units per day. Almost half of the required quantity, make the motors run for only three and half hours a day.

If the state has to supply nine hours of power to the farmers, then 45 units should be provided for each pump set, on the whole, it becomes 76 million unit, making the per annum requirement 27,922.5 million units. But the government is willing to provide an additional 1200 million units making it 12,031.44 million units per annum.

If the additional power to be supplied is added, then the number of hours is not going to be even four hours. The difference between the electricity promised by the government and what is being provided is 15,831.06 million units. Even the electricity department officials are wondering how the TDP government is going to fulfill the nine hours electricity promise.

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