Hyderabad, October 20: In order to provide a big relief to the agriculture sector, the State Government on Wednesday cleared a comprehensive action plan by not allowing any additional financial burden on transportation of DTRs on farmers and in particular to ensure the replacement of failed DTRs within a stipulated period i.e. 24 hours in urban areas and 48 hours in rural areas. This action plan will come into force within a fortnight.
While reviewing the various key issues of power sector at a high level meeting at the Secretariat, Energy Secretary Dinesh Kumar has emphasized the need that the power utilities should reach the expectations of Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar who was keen on replacement of failed DTRs within the time and not to put single rupee burden on farming community for transportation of DTRs.
The Chief Minister was also very keen on establishment of call centers wherein any farmer can easily contact over telephone for registering their complaint and ensures timely delivery of DTRs, he said.
The action plan includes maintenance of 4 per cent rolling stock of DTRs at division/sub-division level, timely transportation of DTRs by the departmental vehicles without giving any scope for transportation by the farmers to avoid burden on them and establishment of call centers within a fortnight to receive complaints from the farmers and to do the needful.
Further it has been decided to give wide publicity at DISCOM/District level about the establishment of call centers with landline/mobile numbers so that it will be easy for farmers to contact for redressal of DTR complaints. The plan will be supervised by CMDs of DISCOMs and make Director (operations) of concerned DISCOMs accountable for overall implementation of action plan and give report.
Since the power supply position has improved to a larger extent due to calling-off of the strike at Singareni Collieries, the Principal Secretary has directed all CMDs of power utilities to fully concentrate on rural areas and put main focus on adequate power supply to the Agrl sector.
The Principal Secretary stressed the need to compare manual log books at substations with meter reading instrument data to analyze and to ensure feeder wise power supply to the agriculture sector as per the guidelines of the government. The government will deploy special teams as third party inspection authority for verification of No. of hours of agriculture supply and timely replacement of failed DTRs.