Bulk power price hike prepares ground for hike at retailers’ end

The bulk electricity price has been hiked by 19.92 per cent. After this decision of Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC), the six state-owned distributor companies will buy electricity at Tk 6.20 per unit instead of the previous Tk 5.17 per unit from December from the Power development Board. It has been declared that this new hike will not impact the retail level consumers.
Apparently it seems that the retailers are spared. But is that true? From where the distributor companies will meet the additional expenses if they do not get this expense from the end users or retail consumers? The new price slab for the retail users is in the offing.
In fact, it was in the news for quite some time that the government was about to increase the power price, but it did not venture to do that because the government already became hugely unpopular for the fuel oil price hike by more than 50 per cent along with increasing the price of fertiliser. Soon, the fuel oil price hike caught the whole consumers’ market in turmoil as prices of all essentials have risen as a domino effect of the fuel price hike.
Due to the fuel oil crisis that has severely compromised electricity generation, many industries, for quite some time, were asking the government that they were ready to buy at a heightened price. Production of many industries has already come down to half. They said that they could not incur loss by keeping idle their capital machineries and giving staff salaries without production. It can be guessed fairly correctly that the next step would be to increase electricity prices for industrial use.
Once that happens, the cost of production in industries will increase and it is the consumers that will have to count extra money to buy their products. After industries, the household consumers will also have to pay for the power price hike. Or, it might be that the price for both the industries and household use would be increased simultaneously.
A government that is in power without people’s mandate and gross human rights violations allowed plundering of public money in the name of installation of rental and quick rental power plants along with the capacity charge for the private power generation companies. It has now no other option left but to put the burden of its mismanagement and corruption on the common people who are already at the receiving end. Now even the middle class people stand in the queue of TCB truck sales to buy some essential commodities to keep their body and soul together.