MUMBAI, Dec 4: The Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) appears to have given top priority to a long pending task - putting its house in order. While the state government is silent on the controversial proposal for privatising the transmission and distribution network, MSEB bosses have begun exploring the option of deploying modern information technology for strengthening its billing and collection system.As a first step, the board has engaged a transnational consultant - Price Waterhouse Associates Private Limited (PWA) - to develop a billing and collection system for high-tension power consumers.According to a top MSEB official, the existing system is based on COBOL and UNIX; applications which have proved inadequate for effective monitoring of the billing and collection of power tariffs. PWA is currently involved in re-engineering the legacy system to a client-server application running on an Oracle RDBMS on UNIX. Work has already started on this complex project at the MSEB head office in Mumbai and is scheduled to be completed in a couple of months.According to MSEB officials, PWA was assigned the task in view of the prodigious amount of resources at its disposal. PWA's technology centre in Calcutta has a direct 128 Kbps connection with similar advanced software centres all over the world. PWA consultants working on this project will be tapping into this global database to come up with a top-notch solution for MSEB. Besides, the firm has to its credit significant experience in such complex programming, having worked for other power sector clients like the Orissa SEB.Energy losses and an ineffective tariff collection mechanism have been adversely affecting MSEB's bottomline . Figures of energy losses in some major cities, in terms of energy received and energy billed for the period of Oct 1995 to March 1996, showed a disturbing trend. Energy losses were reported to be highest in Bhiwandi (59 per cent), Latur (27 per cent), Kalyan (20 per cent), and Aurangabad (19 per cent).Driven into a corner by the resultant cash crunch, MSEB had started a drive for identification of defective meters of high-tension consumers around October 1996. The result was unnerving. Of all the meters verified, 17 per cent in the industrial category and 21 per cent in the commercial consumer category were found to be defective.Though MSEB had been crying hoarse about power theft and the resultant financial losses, the Rajadhyaksha Committee appointed by the board to look into its financial affairs had pointed out that theft was hardly 0.1 percent of the board's annual revenue. Instead, it showed up defective and non-working meters as the culprits. ``The board must adopt specific policies to deal with the problem of defective and non-working meters,'' it said. The PWA's solution is expected to streamline billing and collection apart from putting in place a computerised system for early detection of defective and non-working meters, the official said.
