When the spot billing system of the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (MSEDCL) covers all of its nine divisions in the city next January, it will mean doubling the number of consumer bills it handles at a time. And so the electricity service provider, which now handles about four to five lakh bills every month from 12 lakh subscribers, is falling back on technology to gear up for the challenge.
First on the agenda are automatic bill collection machines which will be operational 24 hours a day. MSEDCL is getting 10 such machines as a part of the revamped bill collection system. The machines will be installed by December end, says R S Gautam, chief engineer of Pune region.
The ATM-like machine can detect the bill amount and the notes fed into it. Moreover, one will also be able to put cheques in the machines. At present, two such machines are functioning at the MSEDCL Rastapeth administrative building and Kothrud divisional office.
According to Gautam, the 10 lakh city customers of MSEDCL will be segregated into four groups and bills will be sent to them in cyclic order with a gap of one week. Thus, each group of customers will get bills every month. This way we can adjust the existing infrastructure to cope with the increased processing of bills.
Also, if every thing goes well, MSEDCL subscribers will be able to pay bills online with credit cards. Pune region chief engineer told Newsline that a proposal to this effect has been sent to the Mumbai based head office of the company.
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