New Delhi, June 13
The Federal Executive of the All India Power Engineers Federation (AIPEF) has categorically opposed the Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2025, demanding its immediate withdrawal. The federation declared that any reform in the power sector must prioritize affordability, accessibility, reliability and public accountability rather than privatization and profit maximization.
AIPEF Chairman Shailendra Dubey said the Bill is not a reform measure but a privatization push aimed at corporatizing generation, transmission, and distribution. The meeting opposed provisions permitting multiple distribution licensees in the same area using the same publicly funded network, warning that such measures would enable private companies to cherry-pick high-paying industrial and commercial consumers while leaving public utilities burdened with socially obligated domestic, agricultural, and rural consumers.
AIPEF Media Advisor V.K. Gupta informed that the federal council meeting, chaired by Dubey, was attended by 21 state constituents including Punjab. Lady engineers from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Odisha, and Ladakh participated. AIPEF leaders including Secretary General Rathnakar Rao, President Basavanna, and Chandra Shekhar Desai, General Secretary of KEB Engineers’ Association, addressed the gathering.
In its resolution, the council termed parallel licensing a backdoor route to privatization and opposed granting such licences in Karnataka, Haryana, Maharashtra and other states. It warned that these proposals pose a grave threat to consumer welfare, rural electrification and the financial sustainability of state-owned distribution utilities.The council also rejected policy initiatives in states such as Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana to create separate agriculture discoms, calling the restructuring technically unjustified, commercially unviable and financially unsustainable.
Strong objection was raised against Andhra Pradesh’s decision to grant a separate distribution licence to the proposed Google Artificial Intelligence Data Centre at Visakhapatnam, which AIPEF warned could set dangerous precedents undermining the viability of public sector discoms.
