No takers for hi-tech bill payment

No takers for hi-tech bill payment
Times of India

Bangalore: India’s Silicon city might be ‘with IT’ on most things, but when it comes to paying the power bill, they prefer the old fashioned queue.

Consider this: Bangalore’s power utility, Bescom, has on offer a veritable battery of technology to ease life for its cons u m e r s : SMS, interactive voice response system (IVRS), Internet ledgers, ATMs, phone-in bills, electronic clearance system (ECS), consolidated bill payment through banks. But, despite the city’s high mobile and Internet penetration, a mere 2.2 per cent of 22 lakh consumers use even the ECS, introduced four years ago.

“We don’t know why consumers are not fully using the technology we offer. I have even got letters of appreciation from abroad, where NRIs are able to track consumption in their homes here via our website. But locally, the tech usage is a bit low,’’ Bescom managing director Bharat Lal Meena told The Times of India.
In contrast to the BCC’s self-assessment scheme (SAS) for property tax, the similar programme of phone-in bill — where the consumer himself calls in the meter-reading to Bescom and gets a physical bill in return — has no takers at all. The SMS option to get bills and register complaints has done a little better — Bescom gets about 1,000 a month, nearly 70 per cent of which are complaints.

The reasons behind sparse usage, however, are not far to seek. Citizens groups maintained that they have explained “several times’’ to Bescom exactly what is wrong with the technology on offer: the style of implementation.

“For example, if you dial the IVRS to register your complaint, it asks you nothing less than 15 questions. It is much simpler to call in and lodge a complaint manually. Besides this, many a time, the IVRS is disabled and no one knows when it will work,’’ citizens group representative P. Suresh contended.

As for ECS and SMS bills, the problem is the same old government office complaint, red-tape. According to citizens, errors in the computerised bills ensure that consumers have to go to the utility every third month for corrections.

But the most absurd one is: tellers at the Bescom payment counters don’t accept an SMS as the bill amount! “They ask us where is the bill? How can we accept this? Technology by itself is very good, but the problem is Bescom does not understand and solve simple problems,’’ Suresh added.

Pre-paid power!

The latest project from Bescom’s techbouquet is: go pre-paid. Two companies are conducting a pilot study in S-6 division (J.P. Nagar), where power currency is credited in prepaid meters. The advantage is: consumers can buy power for smaller amounts. The utility is also toying with giving some free power units to popularise the scheme, but this needs Karnataka Electricity Regulatory Commission (KERC) clearance.