The companies which participated in the technical bid on Tuesday showed interest for only three districts — Kanpur, Agra and Bareilly. Uttar Pradesh Rajya Vidyut Karmachari Samiti, comprising power employees and engineers, however, has made bid for distributing power in all the five districts, including Gorakhpur and Moradabad.

Kanpur remained the most sought after with firms like Torrent Power and JUSCO submitting their technical bids for power distribution in the district. Torrent also bid for Agra, the other bidder being PNC Infratech, in consortium with other companies. Firms like KLG and A to Z Maintenance and Engineering have also placed their technical bids for Bareilly.

The UPPCL has deferred the selection of franchisee for Gorakhpur and Moradabad for February 25 stating there were no bidders for these districts. Officials of UPPCL said that the consultants would now study the technical bids and would make a presentation before the Energy Task Force (ETF) on Wednesday, after which the financial bids would be opened. Any decision for selection of companies would be based on the financial bids.

The Uttar Pradesh Rajya Vidyut Karmachari Samiti claims of better experience in the power distribution and has therefore termed itself more qualified than any other company. “The UP State Electricity Board came into existence in 1959, therefore we have fifty years of experience behind us. Besides, there are engineers of 1971 batch, which gives us thirty years’ additional experience,” said Shailendra Dubey, the Chief Engineer UPPCL.

His arguments is: How can companies like JUSCO which is in power distribution only in Jamshedpur and is catering to only 70,000 consumers compete with us, who are catering to one crore consumers?

The Samiti has suggested to UPPCL to form a Power Employee and Engineers Society and promote it.