Bescom hit by billing woes
This story puts the Silicon Valley of India to shame. A renowned IT giant, based.
Bangalore: This story puts the Silicon Valley of India to shame. A renowned IT giant, based in the IT capital of India, has been unable to provide efficient billing software for the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Limited.
Bescom is crippled by problems with the Infosys software that it uses as part of a central government project initiated a couple of years ago. The project, Restructured Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Programme (RAPDRP) has been implemented across the nation and is funded by the Union government. The total project cost of RAPDRP across all Escoms in Karnataka is close to Rs 470 crore.
Generating faulty bills, jumbling up account numbers and RR numbers in the Electronic Clearance System…the software does it all, said a Bescom technician who does not want to be named. He said the earlier version, Zygox, used for billing by Bescom two years ago was excellent and user-friendly software. The staff was able to process bills for about 700 consumers a day at a single billing counter. Now, only 300 to 350 bills can be processed per day.
The current software has crashed twice, in the last week of October and in the first week of November. Bescom officials said the system crashed when it was fed billing data that exceeded 90 lakh consumers. The billing system was going smoothly till the number of consumers reached 60-70 lakh.
Infosys assured BESCOM that the problem would be rectified by November 30, 2013, but the glitches continue to plague the system. Sources say Infosys has sought an extension of a few more weeks to rectify the problems.
In the meanwhile, since December 1, bills are being generated offline at Bescom counters. Bill collectors are receiving the payments and giving out receipts to consumers. At the close of work, they import the whole day’s data to the central server from individual Bescom counters.
This offline method works only for the main tariff. The miscellaneous amounts, like the additional security deposits, service line costs etc, have to be manually entered separately in Excel sheets, and get them updated on the central server later.