Illegal power connections

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THERE are many in Dhaka city and elsewhere in the country who take illegal and unrecorded connections from overhead electricity supply lines to run small workshops, operate rice mills, flour mills, etc. Such operators make good profits from their activities but they pay nothing to the government in the form of taxes. They evade payment of municipal tax, income tax and other tariffs because in most cases their businesses are conducted in grabbed government lands without proper registration of ownership.
The activities of these people mean huge unauthorised consumption of power by them that lead to shortfall in distributing power to their legitimate users who pay, every month, dutifully the electricity bills. But such dutiful rate payers of electricity find their homes poorly lighted because much power is drawn away illegally by the clandestine users of power. The government increases the rates for the consumption of electricity to cover up losses on account of such thefts and the unjustified extra charges have to be painfully borne by the rightful or legal users of power.
Such injustice must not go on and it was inspirational to see a drive launched earlier against the illegal users of power. But that drive, for all practical purposes, has now ceased because the vested interests within the concerned utility service-providing bodies gain enormously from the operations of illegal users of related services. Making private fortunes at public expenses are a business-as-usual practice for such corrupt people. In this context, it is of utmost importance to operationalise an effective monitoring system to help stop the theft of power and curb systems' losses.

Mahtabuddin Ahmed
Kabi Jashimuddin Road
Kamalapur, Dhaka.