Many residents had a surprise in their lives when they were given their electricity invoice for May. Even after deducting the remaining fee made in April, the payments were ‘surprisingly high’, they alleged. Over the beyond five days, BESCOM officers have been getting frantic calls, messages and emails from purchasers crying foul over high electricity payments.
With meter readings being cast off because of the Covid-19 situation, BESCOM had decided to invoice home purchasers for April based on their average consumption during the last 3 months. BESCOM claims the payments are high due to accelerated usage of home appliances. From May, meter readings have another time started within BESCOM limits.
“The devices ate up had been apportioned for 2 months. If a hundred gadgets were fed on, 50 were apportioned for March and 50 units for April. The quantity paid by way of customers in April, an average of the 3 previous months, has also been deducted on this invoice,” BESCOM coping with director MB Rajesh Gowda stated. Residents, however, are a divided lot.
“If you do a month-through-month calculation of the bill, the total for each month comes lesser than the entire that has been charged by means of Bescom within the May invoice. For instance, in my bill, for 341 units of power ate up, the invoice has come to Rs 2,760.29. If this is calculated on a monthly basis, the invoice for each month might be Rs 989.93,” said Parthasarathy HC, a resident of Brigade Metropolis.
“Initially, I realised there was something incorrect and felt a chunk cheated once I noticed the bill. But when I did the calculation, the computation achieved through BESCOM seemed to be correct. Every slab has been doubled to account for two months. While the primary slab was once 30 devices, now it has to turn out to be 60 and so forth,” stated Subramaniam CP, a resident of Shriram Shankar condo in Banashankari.
