Post meters,water revenue dips 45%

As of April 15,17,000 meters have been installed in the island city,34,000 in the western suburbs and 17,000 in the eastern suburbs. An official from the BMC hydraulic engineering department said while revenue being received from commercial users has increased,that from domestic users has gone by about 50 per cent. 80 per cent of the old meters in the city are damaged or dysfunctional and the users are charged an average of their consumption over the last six months till which accurate reading was available.

“Domestic users were being charged more than their actual consumption while commercial bulk users were being charged lesser than their usage. The quantum of domestic users is much higher than commercial users. Thus,the effect on revenue is expected to show once all the remaining meters are installed. Revenue can drop 30-50 per cent,” said the official.

Called Automated Meter Reading (AMR),the project was introduced over two years back to charge consumers as per their actual usage and also to charge slum-dwellers and other consumers using un-metered connections.

The technology used will help BMC collect data from meters automatically and then transfer the details to a central database for billing,based on actual consumption rather than depending on previous or predicted readings.