Recently I read a case of Gurgaon, about electricity consumers getting their electricity consumption bills too late, say after three months in "Times of India". In this case, residents of Sushant Lok 2 and sector 56 were receiving their bills at almost three months, which is too late. DISCOM usually bills their domestic consumers bi-monthly across India.
Usually DISCOM's meter readers, they are mostly employees of DISCOM takes meter reading by physically visiting consumer's door steps, prepare bill on sight and serve it to consumer. Now a days, Hand Held Equipment (HHE) is used by entering present meter reading. Past reading is usually stored in HHE's memory. When meter reader enters present meter reading against consumers account in HHE, electricity bill gets calculated in HHE as per tariff program. Electricity bill slip is printed in HHE and pasted on already printed bill which is served to consumer for making payment.
The matter of concern is DISCOMs now a days are facing crunch of meter readers due to slower recruitment drives and in exercise of reducing manpower. In this scenario of lack of sufficient employees for meter reading work, DISCOMs officially appoints NGOs, Small Companies etc on usually annual terms as meter reading contractor and get meter reading done through their man power. It has been observed in most cases that, such contract system does not fetch encouraging results in terms of accuracy and time maintenance of meter reading process. Meter reading is a crucial activity for all DISCOM, as entire revenue income of DISCOM against electricity sell is dependent on accuracy and time maintenance of meter reading process.
Late billing causes consumers to pay electricity bills at higher up tariff slabs, because consumers usage pattern is fixed and they are billed every two months falls within fix tariff slabs and they have become used to pay electricity bills accordingly. But if energy bill preparation gets late as above, consumer's consumption for excess days might get enter into next higher tariff slab, ultimately raising bill amount too high for them. Such incident creates grievances among consumers against DISCOM.
In this high tech days where most consumers are having access to smartphones and internet and having world class customer care service experiences from banking, telecom and e-commerce sectors, DISCOMs still are facing such issues lagging behind them in providing satisfactory customer care services, which needs to be addressed by making processes technically advanced and high tech which might be beneficial both for consumers and DISCOMs.
