CONTRARY TO what its name suggests, e-Suvidha launched with much fanfare in the State capital for the convenience of citizens, continues to pose problems to both Lucknow Electricity Supply Administration (LESA) and its consumers.
LESA finds its daily revenue collection dipping at its online-billing centres due to recurrent glitches in the e-Suvidha server at Dalibagh. The consumers, on the other hand, have to stand in long queues at the online billing centres to deposit their bills but when there comes there turns after a long wait, the computer loses its connectivity or it logs out or is hit by some other problem.
However, at present the main problem, as LESA chief engineer, AK Singh pointed out was that the more than two dozen online billing centres, installed with computers, were not able to revise/rectify electricity bills as the server or the team manning it was not able to perform this function.
“More than 10 per cent of the total bills that consumers come to deposit call for revision for various reason. But we cannot revise them due the problem in the server,” Singh said.
This, he said, was badly affecting the revenue collection particularly since the bills that were submitted for revision were are usually of a higher amount. “In October, 1.80 lakh consumers paid Rs 26 crore as bills and in November we got only Rs 28 crore from 2.19 lakh consumers,” pointed out the LESA chief, adding that, “the amount would have been much more if the we had been able to revise bills.”
{{/usCountry}}This, he said, was badly affecting the revenue collection particularly since the bills that were submitted for revision were are usually of a higher amount. “In October, 1.80 lakh consumers paid Rs 26 crore as bills and in November we got only Rs 28 crore from 2.19 lakh consumers,” pointed out the LESA chief, adding that, “the amount would have been much more if the we had been able to revise bills.”
{{/usCountry}}This problem will be even more acute for LESA in view of its launching drive against defaulters from Monday. Since most of the pending bills are disputed and require revision, drive will not be able to fetch much revenue till the bill revision problem is solved.
The faults started to hit the server soon after the e-Suvidha took over LESA’s online billing system from the CMC, a private company, in September-October, this year. It was said that server was old and outlived its utility. Some said the server was overloaded and was not left with much space for storing new data.
he e-Suvida did call its experts from Mumbai. It was claimed that sufficient space had been created in the server to handle new data and that the system would run smoothly at least for next six months. But they proved to be hollow claims.