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‘ ₹210,42,08,405’: Himachal Pradesh businessman gets whopping electricity bill
According to officials, a ‘technical glitch’ led to the bill amount, which was later rectified to ₹4,047.
A man in Himachal Pradesh's Hamirpur district was taken aback after he reportedly received an electricity bill of more than ₹2 billion ( ₹200 crore).
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NDTV reported that Lalit Dhiman, a businessman from the Beherwin Jattan village, received a bill amounting to ₹210,42,08,405 crore for December 2024, while he paid only ₹2,500 for the previous month.
Dhiman went to the electricity board to complain and was told by the officials that a “technical glitch” was behind the high electricity bill, which was rectified and brought down to ₹4,047, the report noted.
A similar incident occurred in Gujarat's Valsad in November last year. Muslim Ansari, a tailor, reportedly got a bill asking for payment of ₹86.41 lakh.
Ansari, whose shop in the Chor Gali of Valsad gets its power from the state-owned Dakshin Gujarat Vij Company Limited, which has more than 32 lakh consumers spread across seven districts in south Gujarat, brought the massive amount to the officials' attention.
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Upon inspection, the authorities had found that two digits – 1 and 0 – were “mistakenly” added to the metre reading and this led to the huge bill amount, which was then corrected to ₹1,540.
“There was a mistake. The person who took the meter reading added the digits 1and 0 to the meter reading. We have now given a revised amount,” Hitesh Patel, an employee of the power distribution company, said at the time.
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According to Ansari, the electricity bill of his shop was almost always less than ₹2,000.
