Hyderabad: Rs 8 lakh power bill is advance' tactic

Hyderabad: In their bid to spend the demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, several consumers paid not only the power consumption charges of the previous month but also for two to three months more.

One consumer paid a whopping Rs 8 lakh in cash towards electricity charges at the Banjara hills electricity office. Officials did not confirm it, but said they were looking into it. “It is not uncommon the Banjara Hills office gets Rs 4 lakh bills paid. Malls, commercial establishments having food joints and other stores and IT firms have monthly bills ranging from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 25 lakh per month,” Discom Banjara Hills assistant divisional engineer Gopala Krishna said.

Such huge bills are normally paid by cheque. The Banjara Hills sub-division office has about 70,000 consumers covering Banjara Hills, Jubilee Hills, Filmnagar, and Madhapur. Southern discom superintending engineer (Hyderabad North) G. Parvatham said the process of accepting the demonitised currency was transparent.

“If the power bills are huge and paid in cash, details including the name of consumer, address and amount paid would be submitted to the Income Tax department,” he said. Demonetised notes are being accepted to give the middle class society a chance to use them, he said.

Earlier, there were traffic jams at electricity offices with consumers in large numbers thronging to pay their electricity bills and many of them parking their vehicles in a haphazard manner which spilled on to the roads causing traffic jams.