Southern States - Andhra Pradesh-Hyderabad   

Racket in collection of power dues unearthed

By Our Special Correspondent

Hyderabad June 25. Consumers pay through their nose to clear hefty electricity bills, but the collected amount does not always reach the power utility. There are leakages allegedly facilitated by the staff themselves--and for their own interests. Here is a classic case.

As part of privatisation, the responsibility of bill collection has been given to the Lions Club at Suryapet in Nalgonda district.

The bill collector manning the counter received the dues from consumers but retained the money for doing his own business, moneylending. By altering dates in the master register, he would delay remittance to the treasury for fetching sufficient dividends out of the funds.

This went on unhindered till the concerned DE (Operations), B. Raja Reddy, who was deputed by the AP Central Power Distribution Company Limited, for bringing this type of "mafia operations'' under control, chanced upon the racket the other day while undertaking an inspection. The amount involved at that point of time was found to be Rs 4 lakhs.

The bill collector, Ch. Ramesh, was since terminated and the amount recovered.

The DE further detected that the computer agency which was given the contract of issuing bills, avoided showing "minimum consumption'' amount (Rs 130 or so) in the bills and indicated the units consumed as "nil'' or at lower levels citing some excuse or the other.

As this favour was done to about 300 consumers, the assistant accounts officer grew suspicious whereupon the entire racket was unearthed.

If the meters were stuck as claimed, the agency should have calculated the units consumed based on the monthly average. In this case, all such bills were "revived'' and about 2,500 high quality meters were installed in place of the ones that got stuck. The Suryapet Municipality and the RTC complex there too have become headaches for Mr Raja Reddy.

Right now, they are defaulting Rs 65 lakhs and Rs 1 lakh, respectively against the present consumption. There has been no response from them even after notices served by the DE who is now contemplating disconnecting the services.

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