PANAJI: After nearly two years of overhauling the electricity consumption billing process, the department has decided to revert to its tested and proven system of delivering the power bills at your doorsteps after a month.
Amidst mounting grievances from consumers of faulty billing and grossly inflated bills from the spot billing system which was implemented in early 2016, Electricity Department has decided to revert to the old system of station billing.
Speaking to this daily, PRO of electricity department, executive engineer Paul Fernandes said that the rising number of complaints related to spot billing has compelled the department to stop the spot billing process and instead follow the earlier system of delivering the bills to the consumers after a month.
“From this month onwards, consumers will receive bills in the old format which will be printed at the back office and then delivered by our meter readers as it was being done earlier,” he added. Clarifying further he said that the earlier process wherein meter readers would note down the reading while delivering the previous month’s will be followed henceforth.
He said, “To streamline the process we had to stop generating the bills for a month which practically means that consumers will now get electricity bill of two months in February and then subsequently monthly bills.”
Meanwhile, on Friday a senior citizen from Miramar was taken aback when she was delivered a bill of more than Rs 2.60 lakh.
The agitated housewife, who was at Fernandes’ office said that she has been paying her power bills regularly and yet the department has raised a bill as high as Rs 2 lakh. “When the government says they are upgrading the system, why are the people being tortured with such inflated bills,” she questioned the PRO.
It may be recalled that GED in 2015 had commenced modernising the state’s power sector under central government sponsored restructured accelerated power development and reforms programme (RAPDRP).
However, the spot billing which was introduced in 2016 failed due to poor quality of ink used for printing the bill strips and now the whole billing system has collapsed.