Fact test: No, the Government of Modi does not introduce a country ‘one power tariff’ law

Is India on track for a uniform power tariff policy? This is what a post on social media claims. The message in Bengali translates to: “Power tariffs will be uniform across the country as the Modi government introduces ‘one country, one tariff’ law.”

The message was posted through the Facebook page “BJP West Bengal”. This is not the official Facebook page of the Bengal BJP unit.

India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the allegation misleading. The Union government does not implement a ‘one nation, one power tariff’ law.

The archived version of the post can be seen here.

AFWA investigation

Using keyword searches, we found several media reports about BJP Rajya Sabha MP Shwait Malik proposing one-off electricity costs in India during Zero Hour of the Upper House on 15 July 2019.

However, there are no reports on whether the government has accepted the proposal or that it softens such a law. The next day, “The Indian Express” published an article on why such a proposal is not viable.

AFWA has reached out to Anirban Guha, the former director of West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Corporation Limited, who claims such a law would not be commercially viable.

“In 1993, the Indian government decided to abolish the freight policy for the sake of commercialization. The power sector is also highly commercialized, and therefore no Indian government has ever considered a uniform power tariff for all states across the There are no information that the NDA government does not implement such a law, ‘Guha said.

In her budget speech for 2019, the Minister of Finance of the Union, Nirmala Sitharaman, announced the project ‘one nation, one grid’.

In September 2020, the Secretary of the Union, Nandan Sahai, claimed that India had already achieved the status of “one nation, one network and one frequency”.

However, the project has nothing to do with power tariffs. It will integrate the five regional networks of India and aims to exchange operating surpluses between the regions. “This project has nothing to do with uniform power tariff,” Guha said.

(Input by Arpit Basu in New Delhi)