Discoms issue 3.36L bills sans meter reading, cite Covid curbs

Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, June 9

About 2.18 lakh power bills under the Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam (UHBVN) and 1.18 lakh bills under the Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam (DHBVN) have not been issued on the actual meter reading to consumers for March in Haryana.

67,590 meters under UHBVN defective

Jhajjar, Panipat, Sonepat and Rohtak have high number of faulty meters

Also, 67,590 electricity meters are defective under the UHBVN. The count of faulty meters is on the higher side in Jhajjar, Panipat, Sonepat and Rohtak. There are 4,631 bills that fall under the high bills trap category and need to be rectified.

Not acceptable: HERC

• SK Bansal, Director (Operations), UHBVN, says bills were issued on the average basis because of Covid-induced lockdown
• The HERC has termed this “not acceptable” as the situation in February this year had returned to near normal

These facts came to light during a suo motu petition hearing on the issuance of regular electricity bills on actual reading before the Haryana Electricity Regulatory Commission (HERC).

The break-up

2.18 lakh bills issued by UHBVN

1.18 lakh by DHBVN

A bench, comprising chairman RK Pachnanda and member Naresh Sardana, observed that 2.18 lakh bills that had not been issued on actual reading comprised 14 per cent of the total consumers, whereas bill mistakes shouldn’t exceed 0.1 per cent as per the SOP regulations 2020.

“Similarly, in the LT (low tension) category, about 15 per cent bills have been issued on an average basis which is humongous.”

The commission noted that if the billing of 24,608 LT connections, involving an amount of Rs 700 crore per annum, could not be tendered on actual consumption, how will the UHBVN be able to issue the bills of 15,57,476 consumers of domestic supply (DS) and non-domestic supply (NDS) based on actual reading as per the regulations.

SK Bansal, Director (Operations), UHBVN, referred to Covid-induced lockdown as the reason behind the issue of the bills on the average basis, which the commission termed “not acceptable” as the situation in February had returned to near normal.

It also pointed out that the number of faulty meters was 5 per cent of the existing ones against the permissible limit of 2 per cent.

When the HERC questioned how a resident of Sector 26, Panchkula, was issued a bill of Rs 77.20 lakh on the consumption of only two units, XEN (Operations) UHBVN submitted that it was wrongly generated by the system. The bill was not trapped in high billing due to a system error.

As per further submissions, the bill was not delivered to the consumer physically, but was downloaded from the portal. The bill was revised and a bill of Rs 2.26 lakh was issued on April 6, which was also wrong. Finally, the bill was corrected on April 13 for Rs 1,636 and paid by the consumer on the same day.

The HERC observed UHBVN officials did not discharge their duty with diligence even after the receipt of the representation of wrong billing and harassed the consumer by issuing a wrong bill even after taking cognisance of the issue. It asked for an action-taken report against the delinquent officials in the matter.

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