Days of consumers stranding under burning sun and in snaky long queues in front of dusty offices for hours just to pay their electricity bills seem to be over for the peoples of Jharkhand as well. To make life easier for millions of its customers the Jharkhand Bijli Vitaran Nigam limited (JBVNl) has made itself ready to adopt fully online bill payment system across 30 towns of the State.
The electricity distribution company has through bidding process selected ‘TechProcess Payment Services limited’, a Mumbai-based company providing online bill payment gateway for the purpose. “The company has been found l1 in the bidding taken place and the JBVNl is about to ink the agreement with it. We are expecting that the service would be rolled out before January 26 in the State,” said a senior official related to JBVNl’s R-APDRP programme.
The service which has been started in lohardaga with limited success few months ago would cover 30 major towns out of total 40 in the State. The list includes all the districts and their headquarters except Khunti, which would be covered under another scheme of the Centre coming under the R-APDRP; meant to improve services towards electricity consumers and also enhancing cash inflow to the electricity boards.
To avail the hackle-free service, the consumers would have to register on the website and after being generated a login id and password one can get information about electricity bill pending. “The consumers can see their bill online and through the payment gateway can pay then and there also. Interesting part of the service is that the JBVNl has no financial bearing of this and the consumer would be charged Rs 3.50 for making one payment which would go to the payment gateway company. As it would save great deal of their time and energy, the consumers would have no complaint either,” added the official.
Apart from major towns like Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Dhanbad, Bokaro, Deoghar, Dumka, others smaller towns such as Daltonganj, Garhwa, Hazaribagh, Chaibasa etc would also be covered by the online bill payment system. Though, the effort to connect electricity meters directly with the data centers of the JBVNl has not materialised yet.
“At present, only some big power consumers and industrial units have been connected through our data centers and their billing has been done on real time basis. For common domestic consumers our agents would visit home to home to take meter readings which would be feeded in our system and bills would be generated for online payment,” said KK Verma, Managing Director of JBVNl. Consumers can pay their bills using credit or debit cards.