Daily Times

I have not been a happy bunny over the past few days. Badly cursing my stars, while testing my pulse at the local sub divisional office of IESCO, where I had been turning up with my nerve busting, artificially inflated electricity bill. ‘I will get to the bottom of this’, I told all the big boys there. None of them seemed too concerned. Then, I realised that I was not the only pebble on the beach, as I bumped into a charming young couple, seemingly in their late twenties, losing their sweat, exhausting their throats and burdened with an eye popping bill that exceeded

Rs 250,000. That sum was large enough to convince me in postponing my own bashing of the IESCO billing department. I realised that here is a story that I simply cannot afford to skip.

It was a freshly married couple, who had moved into a small bed room portion somewhere in the outer vicinity of the capital city, nearly two years ago. Few days after they moved in, their electricity meter was replaced. It turned out that the billing department had not been plugging in the meter readings in the online system for the past twenty-four months.

The bills that were being churned out every month and paid dutifully by the couple were a blend of estimates based on the previous meter and some arithmetic forecasts that only an IESCO engineer could fathom. Twenty-four months later, the billing department finally got a handle on its data entry and thumped the couple with a hefty charge that not even the Sharifs’ with all their plush estates and ceaseless business empires would be willing to pay. Amusingly, the couple was bounded by a two-day deadline to regress their pockets and go belly up. Sifting through minor details of the bill yielded a spate of taxes that, I, as a former student of economics had never heard of.

It was a besetting sin and a deliberate attempt to cover the tracks that would unquestionably rupture the reputation of IESCO, as an able public service body. At least, three questions pinch me to the bone: first, should not the men, endowed with the responsibility for timely bill generation be held to account here? Second, why should the conforming public, foot the bill and pay the price for IESCO’s own administrative failure? And lastly, if the meter readings were not being entered in the system, what was the justification for all those bills being sent to the couple for the past two years? Were all those charges paid over the last twenty-four moons completely baseless and fudged? When I girded up to probe the matter, I found the IESCO staff with a frog in their throats. What the young pair went through is only a brief manifestation of the government’s incompetence in its handling of the energy sector.

If electricity distribution companies are not enabled to recover their dues from all customers — arm twisting by the ministries of Finance and Water and Power for improved recovery of bills and reduced line losses will inevitably lead to a situation where the axe falls on customers already paying their bills

Let us briefly run through the billing procedures of the distribution utilities in Pakistan. These commercial procedures are a legacy from WAPDA, and are completely behind the times and outdated. The staff at these DISCOs is also not sufficient enough to manage the ever growing number of customers every year. The billing process that includes data observation, data transfers and data entry are fairly manual, which often leads to delays in bill generation and creates room for faulty bills. Readings from meters are physically taken to the computer centres for entry and there are no satisfactory validation measures in place to check whether that data is being efficiently entered into the system.

And here lies the rub. If the management at these DISCOs is not efficient enough to cover the billing requirements of all the customers, any arm twisting from the Ministry of Finance or Water and Power to improve the collections and reduce line losses, implies, that the axe inevitably falls on the customers who are already paying their bills. You may have these politicians; whose annual budget speeches suggest that they are ahead of their game. But truth be told: on the scales of governance, Pakistan’s energy sector has still got some serious ground to cover. Spare us the torture Khwaja sahib! It has already been a sizzling Ramadan.

The writer is an alumnus of University of Cambridge and previously worked as a journalist in London. He has also played for Pakistan’s junior cricket team. He can be reached at bjsadiq46@gmail.com