‘Victims’ of inflated bills still in the dark as BSES gets new chiefs

“While the power regulator (Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission,or DERC) has been quoting from a technical report,BSES has been denying everything in that report. We are not sure what happened.”

Sehgal said his bill for the same period over the last few years have ranged between Rs 6,500 and Rs 7,500. Fed up with the continual harassment,many consumers have cleared their dues.

Shamsher Bahadur,a resident of B-3 block in Safdarjung,is one of them. “BSES sent me a notice saying my electricity will be disconnected unless I pay the dues. I decided to pay up — the strategy of the discom and the regulator so far has been to extend the last date to pay the bills,” he said.

Bahadur said he received a bill of Rs 7,090 in August,against “normal” bills of Rs 2,500 to Rs 3,000 for the same period last year.

But Nanki Awath Ramani,75,said she would not pay unless “some sort of solution emerges. This is ridiculous and I wonder how long the discom intends to keep harassing consumers”.

Frustrated with lodging complaints,Sehgal said,“We have launched endless complaints. BSES even sent people to check our power meters,which were given a clean chit. So the issue of inflated bills did not emerge from there.”

The Genesis
After the issue of inflated bills emerged in mid-August,BSES offered many reasons: ranging from “a technical error” to “peak in demand due to unusually hot weather”,and “withdrawal of government subsidies.”

The Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission then launched an independent investigation and roped in the Standardisation,Testing,and Quality Certification (STQC) Directorate to conduct an audit of the discom’s software.

In its report,the STQC pointed out “major discrepancies” in the billing software. But it conceded that the data sample audited was too small to arrive at any firm conclusion. The discom,though,challenged the authenticity of the STQC report and refused to accept that any error had taken place.

The Report
* According to the STQC report,rather than record a consumer’s usage through the Common Meter reading Instrument (a handheld device),discom officials in many cases manually recorded consumption. This led to a difference in what was presented in the bills and what was recorded by CMRI.
* Of the 50 bills analysed by STQC,30 did not display the Meter Reading Date.
* Due to the absence of the Meter Reading date,STQC said it was unable to verify the authenticity of the bills.
* STQC also alleged that the discom refused to cooperate during the course of the investigation. BSES denied all these allegations.

STQC Directorate is an attached office of the government’s Department of Information Technology. It provides quality assurance services in the area of electronics and IT across the country.

What Next?
The electricity regulator is expected to arrive at a decision on the issue by October 31.