Purvanchal Vidyut Vitaran Nigam enforcement teams have booked sixteen electricity-theft cases over five days across Varanasi and a string of eastern Uttar Pradesh districts, officials said on Friday, including a meter-bypass catch at Edhe Lamhi on the city's edge.
Additional Superintendent of Police Samar Bahadur said cases were registered against those found stealing power. Circle Officer Saroj Pandey outlined checks that spanned Varanasi, Azamgarh, Jaunpur, Mirzapur, Bhadohi, Kushinagar, Pratapgarh, Sant Kabir Nagar, Deoria and Fatehpur. In the Varanasi example highlighted publicly, Sub-Inspector Rakesh Yadav's team inspected a consumer premises at Edhe Lamhi and found the meter bypassed.
Other named actions in the same drive included a furniture showroom in Azamgarh's Sherwan market where a domestic connection was allegedly feeding commercial load, a five-kilowatt hooking case in Jaunpur, a meter-bypass find in Mirzapur's Kachhwa, extra-load cable thefts in Kaithana homes checked by Anuj Yadav and junior engineer Subhash Gautam, and a group of seven caught at Akauna by Sub-Inspector Puneet Tiwari's team. Bhadohi, Pratapgarh and Prayagraj contributed further cases in the same five-day tally.
Power theft drains discom revenue and overloads transformers that honest consumers share. Enforcement waves usually mix hooking from lines, meter tampering and tariff misuse. Friday's briefing mixed all three. Assessment amounts for the sixteen cases were not fully detailed in the public summary, so this report does not invent a recovery figure.
For Varanasi households and shops, the Lamhi bypass is the local signal that vigilance teams are active inside the district, not only in far towns. Consumers who suspect illegal hooking on their feeder can still use the discom complaint channels; the drive itself is an agency-led sweep rather than a door-to-door amnesty. The verified facts are the sixteen-case count, the five-day window, the district list, the named officers, and the Lamhi meter-bypass example. Five-day tallies are a common way discoms show enforcement tempo. Sixteen cases across many districts is a spread net rather than a single colony raid. Lamhi's bypass matters locally because it sits inside Varanasi's own map. Furniture shops running commercial load on domestic meters, hooking from overhead lines, and extra-load cables beyond sanctioned kilowatts are the three patterns repeated in Friday's examples. Honest consumers subsidise that theft through higher aggregate losses. The drive's next test is whether assessment bills are served and whether repeat offenders appear in follow-up raids. Discom officials urged honest metering and warned that repeat theft invites disconnection and prosecution. Friday's list is a snapshot of one enforcement window, not a claim that theft has been wiped out across Purvanchal.
