60 farmers dump electricity meters at power dept office | Meerut News

Muzaffarnagar: After receiving exorbitant bills, at least 60 farmers in Uttar Pradesh pulled out their electricity meters from tubewells and dumped it at the power corporation office. “Our repeated complaints did not deliver any results,” the angry farmers said, adding that the meters showed bill readings “between Rs 5,000 and Rs 8,000 per week”.
“These meters were installed on tube wells about three weeks ago. After 15 days, the electricity department started sending us exorbitant bills. We kept asking the authorities to explain to us as to why the bill amount was so high, but no one had the time to respond,” one such aggrieved farmer said on Wednesday.
The incident occurred at Umarpur village in Budhana tehsil of Muzaffarnagar district. Notably, farmers have been protesting against the installation of these meters as they claimed that the government had promised “free electricity”.
Deshpaal Singh, a farmer from Umarpur, said, “We removed our electricity meters because we were receiving exorbitant bills. We left the meters at the power station and officials have now promised to solve the problem.”
Another farmer, Shobharam Kashyap, said, “We were getting Rs 5,200 bill for a week. We want to pay our electricity bill as we used to do earlier. This is our demand.”
Sub divisional officer (SDO) of power department, Budhana, Prashant Kant, said, “A junior engineer informed me about the issue and I passed on the message to higher officials of the department.”
About farmers’ claims on being charged more, the SDO added that these were computer generated bills and in some cases sent without any reading. “Now that this issue has come to our notice, the entire process will be looked into.”
A senior member of Bharatiya Kisan Union, Dheeraj Latian, said, “The government had made a promise to provide free electricity for irrigation. But now electricity meters are being installed which have generated high bill amounts for farmers. The government should fulfill its promise.”
Meanwhile, when the matter was pointed out to Union minister Sanjeev Balyan, who was taking part in a programme in Umarpur, he said, “Electricity meters on tubewells were not installed for the bill. The government wanted to know about our electricity consumption per tubewell. It is my responsibility that electricity meter bills are not installed on tube wells.”