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| Confusion in power consumption billing | | | | The installation of electronic power tariff meters, which was claimed to smoothen the things for the department as well as the consumers, have on the contrary further complicated the issue. While frequent unscheduled power cuts in power supply have lately increase, there is all round confusion in preparing and submitting computerized power consumption bills to the consumers. With the computers installed at the revenue heads of various PDD divisions remaining out of order and defective, bills are raised arbitrarily only to fulfill the targets of revenue collection. In the process some consumers are being made to pay much more than what can be due to them in terms of the power units consumed by them. On the other hand there are still a very large number of consumers who have not installed electronic meters and who are using the power unauthorisedly, without having any legal connection. Even in the case of some households and even commercial establishments where electronic meters have been installed, the consumers have manipulated to take direct connection from the main lines, in connivance with the checking staff in the PDD. As a result of this large scale theft of electricity still going on unabated, the authorities in the PDD are making some law abiding and honest consumers to pay through the nose by raising exorbitant bills disproportionate to their actual consumption. There is no proper maintenance of records of payments of bills in the revenue section of various divisions of the PDD in Jammu city and invariable the consumers are issued the bills including for the consumption of units of electricity for which they had already paid. The entire onus for maintaining the accounts and preserving the receipts and records is put on the consumers, whereas at their own end there is worst confusion and records are missing and computers are giving faulty readings. In cases of some PDD divisions, as per reported by the officials themselves, the computers were out of order for a very long time and hence the bills could not be raised for 4 to 5 months. In addition due to the prolonged strike by the clerical staff the raising of bills and issuing of the same to the consumers remained pending for many months. Now pulled up from above and in ordered to show the results in respect of fulfilling the targets fixed for realizing revenue, bills are raised in haste, arbitrarily and exorbitantly and issued to the consumers, they are demanded depositing their payments as per the arbitrarily raised bills issued to them, within three days of the receipt of the same by them, failing which they will be subjected to penalty and even face disconnection of power supply to them in case the payment of the bill is not deposited by them even after the grace period of seven days. The Minister of State for PDD, Babu Singh who holds independent charge of the department as well as high ups in the department must first set their own house in order and regularize their records, set right their computers and serve the bills to the consumers timely every month, before they deserve to impose fiscal discipline on the consumers. |
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