Following recent reports on K-Electric’s billing discrepancies, readers from across Pakistan began sharing stories of their own experiences with Distribution Companies (DISCOs) in their respective areas.
Practically all DISCOs were found to routinely deviate from the stipulated “thirty-day billing cycle” established by the regulatory authority. In some cases, no meter reading date was available on the bills which prevented consumers from their right to information.
Billing of electricity consumption across Pakistan is governed by the policies of the regulator which apply to all consumers regardless of whether you live in Nawabshah or Nowshera. However, an internal investigation into the bills shared from various sources unearthed rampant discrepancies across the country.
For instance, the bill below for a residential consumer residing in the Ranipur Division – jurisdiction of Sukkur Electric Power Company (SEPCO) – shows that the meter reading was for the month of June was conducted on the 21st of June 2021.
Under NEPRA’s stipulation that each billing cycle be 30 days long, the next meter reading date should have been the 21st of July. As per the online bill extracted from the PITC’s website, the meter was actually read on the 24th of July, 3 full days after the 30-day period.
Further exploration of SEPCO using official sources such as NEPRA’s Performance Evaluation Report for Distribution Companies (2019-20), showed that SEPCO currently has the 2nd highest transmission and distribution losses in the country at 36.30% which are causing the national exchequer an annual loss of PKR 5.9 billion.
An additional PKR 21 billion is being lost owing to poor recovery ratios on bills. However, this poor operational performance is hardly an excuse, because the same stipulations being used to castigate K-Electric are applicable on SEPCO as well.
A similar case is seen in Multan, where a resident of the Mumtazabad division had their meter reading on 22nd June 2021 and the next after a gap of 34 days on the 26th of July 2021.
A similar case was observed in GEPCO. The utility conducted a meter reading with a gap of 33 days to a consumer residing in the Jalal Pur Bhattian division. The meter reading for June was done on 24th June while the next month’s meter reading was done on 27th July.
HESCO also conducted meter readings for residents in Qasimabad with a 32-day gap on the 18th of June 2021 and 20th July 2021.
Faisalabad Electric Supply Company (FESCO) also did not fare any better with a 34-day gap between the meter reading for bills for July and August 2021 for a resident in the Civil Line division.
In KPK, PESCO staff recorded a reading for a residential consumer’s meter in the Khyber division on the 11th of June. Following the 30-day period, the next meter reading would have occurred on the 11th of July, which was a public holiday on account of Sunday. The meter reading was rolled over to the next working day of Monday, which was the 12th of July.
Surprisingly, LESCO’s bills did not even mention the meter reading date, which implies that consumers in the territory cannot determine if the 30-day billing cycle is followed at all!
Meanwhile, IESCO claims that it follows and abides by 30 days cycle which is quite extraordinary in itself considering the impact of public holidays Both of these cases should also be scrutinized by the regulator to ensure that compliance standards are met.
What is clear from the evidence is that across Pakistan, meter readings are being done with considerable deviations from the stipulated period of 30 days which NEPRA has set. If we are to follow these regulations to the letter, it seems that the entire country’s DISCOs are liable for the same penalties and scrutiny.
When the consumers are paying their bills, they usually have the understanding that they’re paying for a month’s worth of power that they have consumed in the past 30 or 31 days. Not all of them look for details like billing cycle and meter reading dates. And even those who do can do nothing about it but pay the bill on time to avoid the hefty late fee.
But for power companies, a single day’s delayed reading can literally mean millions of rupees. How a delayed meter reading cycle works is that it shifts your tariff grade to a higher-cost slab. This means that if your consumption crosses a certain count of units, the tariff will change without you knowing about it.
Resultantly, your entire bill will be charged as per the upper tariff and you’ll end up paying more for the power that you have consumed.
The power companies, however, have a different take on this. According to a senior official in a distribution company who requested to remain anonymous, “The per-unit tariff has two components: the one paid by the user and the one paid by the government as electricity is subsidized in Pakistan.”
According to him, the subsidy is designed to be highest for low-end consumers (lifeline consumers with under 50 to 100 unit consumption) and decreases as the consumption increases. This is essentially why slabs were introduced; the higher the slab the lower the government component of the subsidy and the higher the component of the customer.
“When the customer consumes or is billed at a lower slab, he or she pays less and the government pays more. When the customer gets charged on a higher slab, he or she is entitled to a lesser subsidy. In both cases, the amount is adjusted in the payout,” he adds.
He further informs that as NEPRA periodically adjusts the unit sales mix in tariff, effectively there is no gain for the distribution company.
“So while meter reading dates can vary based on the number of public holidays and other factors in a month and companies regularly violate the impractical 30-day rule, there is neither an incentive nor unfair gain in the bill reading process for these companies,” he reveals.
He adds that regardless of cycle variation, electricity meters can only record what is consumed. In contrast to the perception, no overbilling technically takes place.
The initial report alleges that “The Terms and Conditions of Tariff set by the NEPRA for K-Electric clearly limit the billing period to a maximum duration of 30 days.”
But a similar policy is applicable to all DISCOs across the country, so one can easily substitute QESCO for IESCO and the stipulations will hold true. Secondly, if we follow this exact logic, then any consumer issued 12 bills in a year for a period of exactly 30 days will be billed for a total of 360 days.
The total number of days in a year is 365, and 366 if it is a leap year. Does this mean that all consumers in Pakistan are getting free electricity for 5 days a year? The answer is obviously not.
The fact remains that if all DISCOs in the power sector are governed by the same set of rules laid out by NEPRA, then all of them are equally accountable for any anomalies in their daily operational practices that any one utility is guilty of.
Whether the change is a simple clarification of policy, or a complete rewriting, the right steps need to be taken so that everyone can be on the same page and continue in the correct direction in the interest of consumers.
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