PDD delays bills, consumers forced to pay late charges
Vikram Sharma
Tribune News Service
Jammu, January 21
The distribution of electricity bills by the Power Development Department after the due date for payment is forcing consumers to pay late charges without any fault of theirs.
For the past four to five months PDD employees assigned the job of distribution of power bills to consumers have been delaying their duty.
“Today only we received our electricity bill for the month of December, whose last date of payment was January 15. The bill is of Rs 846 if paid on or before January 15, but a late fee of Rs 13 is to be paid after that,” said Santosh Sharma, a consumer at Rehari.
She said the PDD employee who came to deliver bill when asked about the delay said due to shortage of manpower, the bills were getting delayed.
A PDD official, who also resides in the same locality, said after the change of the status of the state to UT on August 5, all departments were facing an acute shortage of manpower as many employees had been shifted and no replacement was made.
“The PDD had also received guidelines about shifting of employees from one position of work to another, besides filling the vacancies with new recruits or other transferees. Though many employees have been shifted, but till date no posting has been made against the vacancies,” he said.
Meanwhile, giving a rationale behind the delay in billing, he said servers at Bemina, Srinagar, held much of the consumers’ records related to billing, which was shared with the servers in Gladni, Jammu, but since August 5 there have been problems. “Though JKPDD Web portal enables consumers to download electricity bills and also make payments through Internet, but Internet blockade in J&K has caused great inconvenience to the public,” he said.
Sudhir Gupta, Chief Engineer, PDD, Jammu, said due to certain unforeseen reasons the bills got delayed, but the process would be streamlined soon.
“It is due to delay in printing and certain other reasons that the bills are getting delayed, but the mechanism is being streamlined and soon all bills will delivered well in time,” said Sudhir Gupta.
