envisaged the forgiving or waiving of arrears of principal in lieu of a
stipulated one-time payment, and the foregoing of penalty and
interest. The one-time payment had to be paid by a cut-of date,
which was fnally extended to 31st March 2009. On its own showing,
the Petitioner did not pay the amount by that date. It continued to
draw electricity in vast volumes, racking up bills of Rs. One crore
monthly. Even these were delayed. It then fled a slew of writ
petitions and civil applications to stave of recovery and
disconnection. It continued to draw electricity all this time. It is only
now, a full decade later, that it claims, invoking Article 14,
promissory estoppel and legitimate expectation, the beneft of an
expired scheme, as if to suggest that its own repeated defaults and
failures to pay its power bills count for nothing. It claims that this
invocation is just and equitable. In fact, it is neither. It is a wholly
unacceptable imposition on a government-provided service for
private self-serving beneft. It is no use saying that the Petitioner
employs many workers. It does not do so out of any sense of charity.
It does so for proft and for business. We fail to see how any entity
can be entitled to carry on business (and whether or not it actually
makes a proft is irrelevant) at a public cost by not paying for a
service that it continues to draw month on month. There is no
fundamental right to free electricity for business or commercial
purposes. The waivers were intended for one purpose only: to
enable a revival. Those waivers were not unconditional or open-
ended. The scheme of those waivers required, frst, payment of a
one-time amount, which was known to all, and, second, it required
payment of that amount by a cut-of date of 31st March 2009.
Otherwise, the amnesty was unavailable. A later correspondence
cannot be read (or misread) to suggest that a scheme that terminated
