Amidst complaints of powercuts from different parts of the city, including the Delhi Legislative Assembly premises, the Delhi power minister Ajay Maken assured Delhiites of getting better power supply from next summer. He said the privatisation of electricity distribution has been done with the intention to spare consumers the kind of crisis they had been experiencing for years due to large-scale power-theft.

He made his statement in the Delhi Assembly on the first day of the Monsoon Session during a discussion on the "ongoing power crisis following the privatisation of electricity distribution." MLAs of all political parties discussed the matter in detail and expressed their apprehensions over the steps being taken by the Delhi government.

Initiating the debate, BJP MLA and Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly Prof. Jagdish Mukhi blamed the government for the current crisis. He said consumers have been facing problems due to the government’s failure to make advance summer arrangement. The erstwhile Delhi Vidyut Board had been sitting on its plan without doing ground works like replacing old cables and transformers. The DVB apathy finally resulted in a crisis when the private companies took over on July 1.

Prof. Mukhi also tried to corner the government over the process adopted by the latter in handing over distribution works to the two private companies. He said the Delhi government had conducted the whole process in a secretive manner and sold the distribution networks at low prices. The government had even adopted a wrong "business base valuation" method to evaluate the assets of the erstwhile DVB.

However, Mr Maken defended the government’s move and said whatever steps were taken by the Delhi government were approved not only by the Central Vigilance Commission, but also by the two Union ministers, Mr Suresh Prabhu and Mr Arun Shourie. Besides, the Delhi government had appointed the SBI Caps as a consultant. He wondered why the Opposition MLAs had raised such issues when the SBI Caps was a Central government undertaking and both the ministers at the Centre were the part of the BJP-led government. It was the political will of the Congress-led Delhi government that it had gone for privatisation at the right time, he added.

Besides, Mr Maken, the other Congress MLAs, including Narender Nath, Arvinder Singh Lovely, Kiran Walia and Tarwinder Singh Marwah and the Janata Dal (S) MLA Shoaib Iqbal defended the government’s move. Though the BJP, including N.K. Garg and Sahib Singh Chauhan, who took part in discussion, didn’t oppose the privatisation, they were critical of the government’s poorly maintained records as well as secretive approach towards privatisation. Incidentally, the Delhi Legislative Assembly premises too witnessed power-cuts for over three hours just before the beginning of the session on Monday. Besides, many parts of north, northwest and south Delhi faced power cuts for an hour to two hours due to minor local faults and load shedding.