Open Access is the one of the pillars of The Electricity Act 2003. But the Act also lets the local Distribution Companies to impose Cross Subsidy Surcharge on the open access consumers. Due to popular measures of the Governments like Free Power to Agriculture without any budgetary support, the cross subsidy surcharge component in the total energy charge is anywhere between 25 to 40%!!! That varies from consumer to consumer and location to location.

To just get a feel for it, here is the cross subsidy surcharge in Andhra Pradesh for the year 2012-13: