HMWS & SB bill collection system being streamlined

By V.N.Harinath

HYDERABAD, FEB. 3. Thanks to the steps taken recently by the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board, the delivery of bills to consumers and collection of revenue is being improved.

The delivery of bills, hitherto done by the postal department, has been entrusted to the board staff itself, after some department personnel bungled, leading to delay. Naturally, the consumers cried foul, blaming the board for non-receipt of bills.

After the management decided in December to monitor the revenue collection and entrust the job to the staff, the defaulters are vigorously pursued. This, Mr.K.Prabhakar Reddy, Executive Director, HMWSSB, is confident, would yield results. He told The Hindu that, with the staff in hot pursuit, the consumers would, like in the case of the AP Transco, pay up.

The revenue collection is also expected to get a boost because of the introduction of incentive scheme of paying to the staff 5 per cent of the collected amount from about 20,000 consumers identified by the board as having never paid.

This collection is being monitored once in 15 days by the top guns of the board like general managers and the staff are kept on their toes. The Executive Director is himself keeping a tab of the revenue collection by about 120 staff members.

Besides, Mr.Reddy says, the facility of providing computer details of the bills at one of the 36 HMWSSB collection centres nearest to the consumers should help the people remit the due amount and strengthen the coffers of the board. The board's computer set-up has `pucca' details of the 3.6 lakh registered consumers.

This computer would give a printout listing the total transactions of the consumer, including an extract of the payments made to the board. "Everything is transparent. Still if anyone has doubts the general managers could be approached with complaints. If the complaints are proved to be correct the excess amount would be adjusted. Also, the board officials would initiate appropriate corrective action then and there," Mr. Reddy asserts.

He explains that the computerised billing system went haywire in April 2000 after "mishandling" by the staff. "The system crashed. As a consequence, no bills could be provided to the consumers. It took time to rectify the flaws. By November the billing system was restored".

Another reason for the delayed computerised billing, according to Mr. Reddy, was the addition of 30,000 connections of the Kukatpally area into the board fold in 1999. This delay was caused by lack of correct data. This mistake was also corrected in November/December last year with the collection of required information. The bills were also generated,

"Still, if there is any consumer who is not getting the computerised bill the best course of action would be to approach the nearest revenue collection centre and know the amount they have to pay. By doing so the consumers would strengthen the efforts of the board to provide better services to the people with improved finances".

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