Government departments owe Rs 3,747 crore in power dues, while ordinary consumers are paying promptly and efficiently.
There is something deeply troubling about the way Jammu and Kashmir’s power sector functions. Ordinary consumers, households managing tight budgets, small shopkeepers, and farmers are paying their electricity bills with increasing regularity. Collection efficiency has climbed to 96.7 per cent, a number that reflects genuine civic compliance from the people. And yet, the single largest category of defaulters is not the poor household in a remote village or the struggling trader in a town market. It is the government itself.
A recently presented data set in the Assembly lays bare an uncomfortable truth. Outstanding power dues from government departments, security establishments and public sector undertakings have accumulated to a staggering Rs 3,747.35 crore. This is not a rounding error or a bookkeeping lag. This is a structural failure of fiscal discipline, hiding in plain sight.
The Public Health Engineering Department alone owes Rs 1,300 crore. The Irrigation Department has let dues pile up to Rs 580 crore. Municipal bodies, which collect taxes from citizens partly to fund exactly these obligations, owe Rs 241 crore. The Health Department, which runs hospitals that cannot afford to lose power for even a moment, has unpaid bills of Rs 182 crore. Most remarkably, the Power Development Department itself, the very body responsible for the sector’s financial health, has not paid Rs 107 crore of its own dues.
This is a crisis of accountability, not of capacity.
Jammu and Kashmir spends approximately Rs 8,254 crore annually on purchasing electricity, a bill that accounts for nearly 87 per cent of the entire power sector’s expenditure. Against that, tariff collections stand at roughly Rs 4,908 crore. The gap is enormous, and it is the ordinary taxpayer who ultimately bridges it through budgetary transfers. When government departments refuse to pay their power bills, they are not saving public money, they are shifting the burden onto it, and onto the very consumers who are doing their part honestly.
The administration speaks of DISCOMs vigorously pursuing recovery. But vigorous pursuit without consequence is merely correspondence. No coercive measures, no penalties, no disconnections, nothing that would impose on a defaulting government department the same discipline that a private consumer faces when a bill goes unpaid.
Jammu and Kashmir is water-rich but energy-scarce. Every unit of power purchased costs money, and this Union Territory can ill afford to waste. The government has invested considerable effort in smart metering, billing reform and infrastructure upgrades to improve consumer compliance. It is time to direct that same rigour inward. The state cannot ask its citizens to pay promptly while its own departments quietly look the other way.
That is not governance. That is hypocrisy with a balance sheet.
