VietNamNet Bridge – Eighty per cent of poor households currently receive Government support with their power bills, Chu Quang Cuong, head of the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs' Planning and Finance Department said on Tuesday.

As of April 1, the households had been provided with financial support for their electricity bills for March and the second quarter of this year, Cuong said.

He said those that had not been given financial aid had failed to follow proper procedures.

He said that in some districts, residents had encountered trouble opening accounts at the State Treasury, which meant the ministry could not transfer funds to them.

He also said some disadvantaged members of the public could not be contacted because they were working away from home.

"However, we will make every effort to allocate power bill subsidies to poor households in May," Cuong said.

According to Cuong, there are two ways of financing poor and low-income households.

For poor households, each family would receive direct State support of VND30,000 per month from local authorities. With this support, about VND1.1 trillion (US$52.4 million) from the State budget would be transferred to wards and communes, Cuong estimated.

Currently, there are about 3.1 million poor households nationwide.

"Every six months or once a year, we will review and reassess households to update the number of poor households and ensure that all of them will benefit from these policies," Cuong stressed.

Under the poverty standard applied for the 2011-15 period approved by the Prime Minister on September 21, 2010, poor households in rural areas are those which have monthly incomes of below VND400,000 per person, and poor households in urban areas are those which have monthly income of VND500,000 per person.

The ministry was only in charge of providing subsidies to poor households, he added.

For low-income households which consumed less than 50kWh per month for three consecutive months, they could register with Electricity of Viet Nam's subsidiaries to buy electricity at VND993 ($0.047) per kWh instead of the average rate of VND1,242 ($0.05) per kWh.

EVN would track power consumption of these households during the three months, and then deduct charges from their bills. Due to these procedures, it would take more time for low-income households to receive the support, he said.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News