haryana
PIONEER | Agenda Foray
CHANDIGARH | Monday, May 24, 2010 | Email | Print |

UHBVN employees fleece consumers by recording extra load

Ravinder Saini | Rohtak

The Loss Prevention Incentive scheme launched by the Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam (UHBVN) to curb the menace of theft of energy and unauthorised use of electricity is turning out to be a medium to fleece power consumers by its employees.

Just to avail the benefit of the scheme, the Nigam employees are not only violating the official instructions with impunity by recording additional workload of consumers in the name of metre checking but giving a bad name to the Nigam as well.

Following this, a significant number of complaints seeking re-checking of load are pending with the Nigam wherein it has been alleged that raiding teams of the Nigam have not been noting down their electricity load as per the Nigam instructions.

An investigation conducted by The Pioneer into the matter reveals that the employees are committing the “illegality” deliberately with an intention to get incentive that is given on higher electricity load of a consumer.

Though, the consumers have brought the prevalent corrupt practice into the notice of senior officials of the Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam several times but they are turning a blind eye towards it which has created resentment among the public.

As per the scheme, every member of metre checking team are entitled to get incentives only when load of a consumer, who found to be guilty of power theft, is over five kilowatt. If the load is below five kw then they can not avail the benefit of it.

This is the foremost reason, the raiding team most of the time does not hesitate to mention the load of consumers over five kw in the checking report whether the load is much below then it.

According to scheme, incentive of Rs 200 to each member of a checking party is given on detection of every unauthorised use of electricity or theft of energy. Besides, 20 per cent of the amount that is realised on account of final statement of a case is also distributed among XEN, SDO, JE, police, SDO, OP, CE and clerks.

As per the Nigam instructions, name of electrical equipments can not be mentioned in the checking report as the rating of various domestic appliances have already been specified by the Nigam for the purpose of computing the actual connected load of the consumers. Notwithstanding all, the raiding teams note down names of various domestic appliances like washing machine, iron, water rode etc with its self-computed load in the report.

Surprisingly, this corrupt practice of the checking team is also in the knowledge of the Nigam’s senior officials. A superintending engineer of the Nigam has recently written a letter to the UHBVN Vigilance executive engineer wherein he has admitted that the load recording is not being done as per rules.

In the letter the superintending engineer has urged the executive engineer to advise his checking party officials to record the load of consumers as per the Nigam’s rules to avoid any controversy and bad name to the Nigam.

The superintending engineer also mentioned that investigation of a complaint has revealed that load of power plugs has been added additionally though load of total equipments installed such as geyser etc has also been counted for.

“Checking teams of the Nigam have been misusing their powers to extort money from the consumers. Though the Nigam’s senior officials are well aware of this ‘illegalities’ being committed by the checking team but they are willfully not paying any heed towards it,” said Sushil Kumar, a consumer, adding that the officials must give their attention to curb the corrupt practice otherwise they would have to face the wrath of the public.