The Administration cites increased demand to justify the hike and says it's either pay more or bear power cuts. The hike has not been taken smile and a shrug; most people are already on short rations -- literally -- thanks to the high cost of just about all foodstuffs. Two months ago a cost-of-living survey put Chandigarh at the top of the list. With the new power tariff, the UT is going to go right off the chart.

A hike in power tariff is bad news for everybody from business tycoons to casual labourers. With a higher electricity bill to pay, industrial units will have to 1) raise the price of goods or 2) cut back. Higher priced goods translate as falling sales and cut back translates as immediate fall in production and immediate rise in unemployment. Reduced profits and reduced -- or vanished -- wages mean recession. Everything becomes costlier and at the same time, buying power shrinks. Yes, it's happening all over Asia, but that's not much consolation for us in Chandigarh.

The Chandigarh consumer's first question concerns basic good housekeeping: Are the UT's power resources being effectively, thriftily managed? It is no secret that several large industries have run up electricity bill arrears that run into crores. Why has the UT Electricity Department failed to collect? The domestic consumer who doesn't pay up on the due date soon finds himself in the dark so why is the meter kept running for the defaulting industrialist? At the other end of the scale are the thousands upon thousands of micro power-thefts committed every day via the unabashed use of kundis. Every week newspaper readers are treated to reports of kundi-removals carried out at one or another labour colony.

The reports usually end with the terse observation that "no sooner did the enforcement staff depart than jhuggi-dwellers emerged with replacements and by the time darkness fell the lights were back." Universal -- and permanent -- removal of kundis is crucial to any scheme to provide metered electricity to slum residents. Few would oppose a scheme to provide minimal power to very poor people -- if nothing else, electrifying the slums may give the residents something else to do besides breed.

Likewise, few would oppose subsiding the scheme heavily. But as a matter of principle, free electricity cannot be allowed. To the unresisting sheep (otherwise known as the honest electricity consumer) one thing that makes this latest tariff hike so unpalatable is that he knows that he's being fleeced because the government lacks the political will to take the shears to the really big and woolly crooks. Will the UT Electricity Department ever act to end mismanagement and tighten control on resources. Can it act?