CHENNAI: State BJP president K Annamalai on Monday lambasted the DMK government for its failure to implement a long-overdue tariff revision for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in the State.

“The DMK government has been increasing electricity tariffs every year, causing immense hardship to the public. The industry associations had demanded that the electricity connection category for these small industries be changed from III-B to III-A (1), which would reduce the electricity tariff from Rs 9.60 to Rs 4.65 per unit. However, despite the TNERC’s directive, the TNEB has refused to implement the automatic reclassification, forcing MSMEs to apply separately for the revision,” he said in a statement.

The State BJP president also urged the DMK government to immediately convert all MSMEs using electrical loads of 12 kW and below from category III-B to category III-A (1) automatically and to refund the excess rates collected from these companies for the last one and a half years.

“It is inexplicable that the TNEB can automatically transfer companies consuming more than 12 kW of electricity load to the higher tariff category through software updates but expects the industries to apply separately to transfer to the lower tariff category. Is the intention to deceive the industry by issuing announcements just for the sake of publicity?” Annamalai asked.