Tangedco in a piquant situation over billing consumers

Engineers object to exemption given to assessors

The decision of Tangedco to stop door-to-door meter reading in the city has not gone down well with consumer activists as well as its engineering staff. Having extended the last date for payment of electricity bills from May 10 to 24, Tangedco again revised the date to June 7, stopped door-to-door assessment and asked the domestic consumers to pay the electricity bill equivalent to the amount of the corresponding month in 2019 or take a reading of the meter on their own and accordingly pay the electricity bill for the May cycle. Somasundaram, a consumer activist, alleged that when hundreds of operation and maintenance staff were attending to complaints of power breakdown, at times even in containment zones, exempting meter readers alone from their work was not a good administrative decision. It was causing much hardship to domestic consumers and brought a bad name to the power utility. He said that the consumers would have difficulty in taking down the reading because of technical issues with various digital meters.