Customer Attitudes Towards the Role of Socio-Economic Factors in Electricity Theft: An Empirical Investigation

Introduction

Electricity theft has become a pervasive scourge for electricity distribution companies (DISCOMs) and their customers in many developing countries including India (Antmann, 2009; Depuru et al., 2011; Sharma et al., 2016). Due to the deficiency in revenue generation, DISCOMs have to experience financial incapability to fund better resources to check upon electricity pilferage (Gaur & Gupta, 2016). Despite being one of the key targets of power sector reforms, the extent of electricity theft has rapidly spiraled in recent years (Ranganathan, 2005). It has a fundamental role in aggravating the situation of electricity crisis by causing electricity shortages, rise in electricity tariffs and other bad consequences (Jamil, 2013; Lewis, 2015). Although, the issue of electricity theft is present at the last step in the power supply chain, but it is impeding the sustainable growth of the entire power sector and thereby, economic growth of many developing countries (Saini et al., 2016). Hitherto, technical perspectives of electricity theft has been the major concern without paying much heed to its socio-economic stance in accordance to economics literature. Electricity customers are the important part of theft phenomenon in the role of culprit and as well as a victim because legitimate customers have to bear the brunt of rising electricity tariff (Singh et al., 2018). The attitude of customers towards DISCOMs decides their actions and behavior which further determines their tendency to indulge in criminal activities like illegal abstraction of electricity. What the employees feel and think about their employer company, it largely impacts their behavior towards their service or responsibilities. If they think positively about something, they will exhibit loyalty towards that thing and if they have negative feelings towards any service, they will not favor that service at all (Barksdale & Darden, 1972). Their attitude towards their DISCOM also gets influenced by various socio-economic factors. These circumstances put emphasis on the consideration of socio-economic outlook of electricity theft.