Power Tariff Hike

Dear friends, Govt. Depts. have their own way of doing the price hike work in every sphere. I wonder why all such departments periodically review and enhance the tariff on a planned and phased manner year after year which will reduce the burden of all instead of hiking sporadically like this. For instance, the Railways have not increased the rail fare for the last few years to earn the goodwill of aam aadmi and their votes paying little attention to the comfort and safe travel of the public. Then all of a sudden they increase (which is bound to happen some time or the other) the fare, followed by agitation damaging public property etc. Take water tariff, which was increased by an astounding figure of 70% which we had taken the initiative and publicized through this channel as well. Did anybody protest and was it reduced! NO!! Electricity tariff followed, which got wide publicity unlike the water tariff. Can we live without water but we could survive without electricity at least from some time. Why not we plead with all Govt. agencies like DJB, MCD, BSES etc. etc. to have a chartered increase in tariff spread over a period of time which the people could expect and not taken aback suddenly like the one now. There is no such system. It is system failure. Why should we have 'sodium vapour bulbs' for street lights replacing the tube lights consuming four to five times of power. Take parks all of them illuminated with halogen bulbs consuming enormous power. Why not the BSES adopt the CFL bulbs for all these purposes, which have been adopted by Chennai Municipal Corporation which will reduce the consumption of power drastically. Again why the street lights remain lighted till 7 a.m. while they could be shut much earlier. We had pleaded with the authorities concerned to fix the switches for switching of the street lights at convenient points on each wing of the colony but not yet done so that we could (RWAs) ourselves switch off leading to considerable saving of power. We are yet to adopt the scheme of replacing the conventional bulbs etc. by CFLs on exchange basis. Similarly, gas connection could be got to geyser, instead of using the conventional power supply which would also reduce the power consumption to a considerable extent! In Govt. offices and public places lights and fans are always on irrespective of the requirement and necessity!  By all these means we could reduce the electricity consumption beyond imagination! Is it astounding! By protesting on the streets and damaging the public property we cannot achieve what we desire, except 'cheap publicity' through various means of media, which only perhaps we wish to project ourselves. No offence to anyone!  With regards, TK Balu Secretary/RBECHS/Anand Vihar