IF you are trying to follow the discussion around the government’s attempt to reduce net metering rates and find it too technical or too confusing, don’t worry. You’re not alone, and more importantly, as an ordinary consumer, you don’t need to get into the technicalities. All you need, as a user of electricity, is a clear and firm idea of where your specific interests lie.

Around 10 years ago, the electricity in my bills cost me Rs20 per unit, including taxes and everything. Today, the same cost is around Rs60 and sometimes as high as Rs70. All of us have been hit by this tsunami of inflation. Some of us tried to cope with it by investing in a rooftop solar system in the hopes that once it pays itself off, it will provide us with some protection from the skyrocketing price of electricity.

These prices did not skyrocket because of anything we did. They rose for two reasons. First, because the rupee fell against the dollar, and most of our electricity prices are indexed to the dollar since we rely on imported fuel and equipment in order to generate it. Second, the bureaucrats cannot run the power system and won’t let anyone else run it either. The most visible marker of their failure to operate the power system is the rise of the circular debt.

So they kept taking the costs of their failures and passing them on to us. When their failures to run the power system led to the rise of the circular debt in the years since 2005, they........

© Dawn