Tangedco in a piquant situation over billing consumers
30/05/2021
R. SrikanthCHENNAI
The decision of Tangedco to stop door-to-door meter reading in the city has not gone down well with the consumer activists as well as its engineering staff.
Having extended the last date for payment of electricity bills from May 10 to 24, Tangedco again revised the date to June 7, stopped door-to-door assessment and asked the domestic consumers to pay the electricity bill equivalent to the amount of corresponding month in 2019 or take a reading of the meter on their own and accordingly pay the electricity bill for May cycle.
Somasundaram, a consumer activist, alleged that when hundreds of the operation and maintenance staff were attending to complaints of power breakdown, at times even in containment zones, exempting meter readers alone from their work was not a good administrative decision. It was causing much hardship to the domestic consumers and brought bad name to the power utility. He said the consumers would have difficulty in taking down the reading because of technical issues with various digital meters.
A divisional engineer of Tangedco said unlike the static meter where one could easily find the number of units consumed, the lack of uniform installation of digital meters would result in wrong calculation of meter readings. He said: “Already, electricity bill issues of hundreds of customers of the lockdown of last year are yet to be resolved by the local officials and this would burden the local electricity staff.” The electricity official said there are over more than 90 lakh domestic consumers in the city and the three neighbouring districts of Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpattu.
A senior official said the assessors’ unions refused to take up door-to-door billing during the lockdown and so it was forced to give the options of self-assessment or pay the amount equivalent to the corresponding month bill of 2019. However, there would be more clarity in a few days, he added.
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