Cuttack, June 27: The Orissa Electricity Regulatory Commission (OERC) today filed a petition before the high court seeking discontinuance of interim order imposing restriction on collection of enhanced tariff from domestic consumers.

While issuing an interim order on a PIL, the high court, on March 31, issued a stay order on OERC’s order enhancing tariff of electricity for 2011- 2012 from April 1.

On June 22, the high court modified the interim order and left it open for the distribution companies to collect revised tariff from High tension (HT) and Extra-high tension (EHT) consumers. “But the revised shall not be collected from the Domestic Low Tension (LT) consumers till June 27 when the matter shall be heard,” the modified order said.

In its petition, OERC said the stay order since March 31 had already resulted in accumulated under recovery of Rs 353.57 crore at the rate of Rs 117.79 crore per month from consumers and the “present interim stay order now accumulates under-recovery of Rs 18.6 crores per month so long as it continues”.

“In the long term perspective the commission will face insurmountable difficulties in tariff setting for the current and subsequent years,” the petition said.

“If tariff of LT domestic consumers is kept low by court’s interim order and under-recovery continues, the shortfall of revenue of this category cannot be met by any increased cross-subsidy as domestic LT consumers constitute a heavily cross-subsidised category and are cross subsidised mostly by EHT and HT categories of consumers,” the petition claimed.

Taking note of it, the division bench of Justice B.P. Das and Justice B.K. Mishra adjourned hearing to Wednesday and extended till then the interim stay order on collection of enhanced tariff from domestic consumers.

According to OERC’s petition, it would be impossible to recover the accumulated under-recoveries from the consumers if the petitioner loses and the revised tariff effective from April 1, 2011 is sustained. On the other hand, if the petitioner wins, and the court directs reduction of tariff after vacating the stay order now the excess recoveries can be adjusted in future bills of the consumers.

“Therefore, the balance of convenience is in favour of discontinuance of the interim stay order,” the commission contended.