The MSEB had recently launched yet another scheme called Krishimitra to recover power bill arrears from farmers and electricity consumers in the rural areas of the State. The scheme evoked good response from the consumers and hence, the Board decided to launch a similar scheme for the urban areas. Navprabha scheme will target consumers who defaulted in paying electricity bills despite several notices and had to face disconnection of supply.

The number of consumers whose power supply was disconnected by MSEB till June 30, 1999 was a whopping 5,28,733. These consumers owe Rs 284 crore to the MSEB, out of which Rs 120 crore are pending with residential consumers, 1.31 lakh commercial consumers have built up an arrears of Rs 82 crore and43,000 industrial consumers owe Rs 82.23 crore.

The MSEB has noticed that disconnecting power supply does not help much where recovery of power bills is concerned. In several cases, consumers had obtained a fresh power supply connection by submitting same address with a different name. It was also noticed that in such cases, MSEB officials had colluded with defaulting consumers. Moving court against the non-payers too has not helped and over 58,000 cases of recovery filed by the Board against erring consumers are pending at various courts. The amount of bills involved in these cases is Rs 164 crore. The Navprabha scheme will be applicable to residential, commercial and industrial consumers whose power supply was disconnected on or before June 30 this year. If these consumers pay off all their pending bills under this scheme, they may be rest assured that no action will be initiated against them for non-payment of bills. Moreover, no interest will be charged for the amount of bill not paid by consumers sofar. The MSEB will also withdraw cases against the consumers if the bills are paid under the scheme.

Consumers can apply to Maharashtra State Electricity Board to participate in the scheme till September 30 and the last date to pay the bills will be October 15, 1999.

For bills amounting to Rs 5,000, consumers can approach the Assistant Executive Engineer concerned and those with arrears up to Rs 25,000 can approach the Superintending Engineer.