Former Finance Minister and Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) patron Sampat Singh on Thursday demanded that Chief Minister Nayab Saini invoke Section 108 of the Electricity Act, 2003, to issue a written policy directive halting the grant of parallel power distribution licence in the public interest.

He described the Haryana Electricity Regulatory Commission’s (HERC) decision to grant a licence to Eleven Power Private Limited as a “pre-planned, dictated assault engineered by the BJP governments at the State and Centre”.

Accusing the regulator of abdicating its statutory duty and acting as a “rubber stamp of the State government”, Mr. Singh, at a press conference in Chandigarh, said the government was now hiding behind the regulator to push electricity distribution privatisation.

Energy Minister Anil Vij, meanwhile, said all arrangements had been made to ensure uninterrupted power supply during the electricity employees’ strike, calling the protest unnecessary. He said the department had opposed the grant of licence to the private company and engaged a senior lawyer to present its case before the regulator. However, the HERC was an autonomous body, he said, adding that the State government had not invited applications for privatisation of electricity distribution. Under the Central Act, any individual or company was entitled to apply for a distribution licence.

Dismissing the Minister’s statement about filing an appeal as a technical diversion, Mr. Singh questioned the financial viability of granting a licence involving a ₹4,700-crore project to a newly incorporated company with a capital of ₹1 crore. He alleged that the HERC had accepted a “fictitious” market valuation of ₹4,085 crore against an audited book value of ₹95 crore.

Mr. Singh warned that the parallel licence threatened the operational and financial viability of State power utilities by diverting profitable commercial consumers to the private licensee while leaving public distribution companies to bear fixed network costs and serve less profitable consumer categories. This, he said, could jeopardise the job security of power engineers and employees and shift the financial burden to farmers, rural households and small consumers.

He alleged that the order facilitated “cherry-picking” of profitable consumers, pointing out that Gurugram accounted for 42.98% of Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam Limited’s revenue, at ₹9,493 crore, while recording distribution losses of just 4.7%. Yet, he claimed, the private licensee planned near-zero investment in Gurugram city during the first two years.

Warning of a cross-subsidy crisis, Mr. Singh said that under Paragraph 13.10 of the HERC order, high-paying corporate consumers migrating to the private licensee could no longer be charged cross-subsidy surcharges. He estimated that DHBVNL could face an annual cross-subsidy loss of ₹3,000 crore and a potential revenue loss of up to ₹4,272 crore.