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Harassment of customer by Electricity Authority

17 November 2003, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Iqbal Hussain, Dhaka
17 November 2003, 18:00 PM
Recently we are getting a notice in our area from DESA, printed on the face of our electricity bill. The notice says all customers are required to get clearance certificate of bill payments by certain date. When customers went to the electricity office with last six to twelve months paid bills they were told they were required to have clearance certificate until end of December 2002. But when the customers asked to have their clearance certificate for that period they were told they owed the authority thousands of taka for unpaid bills dating back ten to fifteen years depending on when the meters were first installed in different households.

As the authority cannot find those payments in their ledger book they consider these are unpaid and shift the burden of proof to the customers. The authority would not bother to look into the original advice slips containing customer references sent by the bank which received the payments of the bills in the first pace. If they look into those records they will find that it was their employees who did not post those paid bills in the ledger due to negligence.

Now if you ask the authority to trace those bank advice slips they won't be able to trace them. There is no penalty if they lose their documents. But if a customer can not show a ten years old bill listed as unpaid that customer has to pay the bill again within 21 days or the electric line will be disconnected. I saw a lady went back home and produced it to a clerk. The clerk immediately started to post those bills in the ledger book. The lady was lucky to trace her very old bills. This incident proved that, the authority's claim of those unpaid bills was false. This cannot be isolated incident as majority of customers were informed they had some old unpaid bills.

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Now my question is what happened to the original payments of the lady who produced her old paid bills listed as unpaid and how the books of the authority were reconciled. Why so many discrepancies were not detected in the audit process? Why the customer should pay a very old bill again if it is lost. Why the authority should not be compelled to prove conclusively producing original bank advice slips of the paid bills containing customers reference numbers.

I am drawing attention of the higher authority in this matter to intervene and investigate to find our those who created this mess in the first place and take necessary action against them and do not disconnect innocent customers line just because someone has lost his/her very old bill.