Some water consumers in the city have not received their bill for the past two to three months.
According to sources, the miss was partly due to the shortage of manpower in the Mangalore office of Bellary Computer IT Solution Pvt. Ltd., which has been issuing bills on behalf of the corporation.
Sources said the three-year contract of the company with the civic body would end next month-end and there was no guarantee that the company would be hired for another term. Hence, five of the 28 employees of the company working in the billing section had quit. This has resulted in consumers in some areas not getting their bills.
The company recruited three employees recently and the normalcy would return by this month-end, sources said. The corporation gave the company Rs. 7.25 per bill for delivering it to consumers.
According to Gokuldas, Assistant Executive Engineer, in-charge of water supply at the civic body the process of inviting bids to select a company for issuing the bills from April had begun.
Mr. Gokuldas said each junior engineer would be allocated certain wards with a list of defaulters of water bill dues to collect dues before March.
Meanwhile, in a press release the Commissioner Ajith Kumar Hegde S said water connections of those defaulters would be disconnected if they did not pay during the special drive.
Sources in the company said of the 79,000 water connections on record, 4,000 connections have been disconnected for various reasons. Still it was issuing monthly bills to only about 55,000 consumers. In most of the remaining cases there were double entries. It meant that two sequence numbers had been issued against one name and one door number. There was confusion here. Unless the corporation cleared it, it would be difficult to issue bills to such door numbers, they said.
