The Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) has been presenting pretty statistics of increased recoveries, but residents of Model Colony Street No. 15 will testify that those figures are grounded in the power utility billing them twice in one month. Consumers from Model Colony Street No. 15 complained to Pakistan Today that they received two bills in April, each bearing a different due date for payment. The first asked consumers to pay by April 9, while the second slapped a payment deadline of April 23.
“I was very surprised when I got the second bill, days after I cleared the outstanding payment for March,” one of the residents, requesting anonymity, told Pakistan Today. Another man in the neighbourhood of at least 100 houses claimed that there was little they could do since neither the KESC nor the government could explain how the bills could be disputed. “We do not know what to do as both the helpline centre of the KESC and the department concerned have no answers,” he said.
The aggrieved electricity consumers said that the fresh bills issued to them bear excessive amounts as compared to the bills of previous months. Meanwhile, sources told Pakistan Today that the case was not a new one, as the company had previously also issued two bills to various consumers in North Karachi and Safura Chowrangi. These bills were also of inflated amounts, sources added. KESC Shareholders’ Association Secretary Chaudhry Mazhar told Pakistan Today that double billing in a single month was a serious violation of corporate law. “The company can issue one bill in two or three months, but not more than one in a month.”
“The company recovered over Rs 10 billion this year as compared to the Rs 5 billion it collected during the same period last year. It seems the KESC is only interested in increasing the revenue, and this (billing twice in one month) is another tactic to generate revenue,” he alleged, claiming that the two bills not only included power tariffs but also other charges and taxes under different heads. Despite repeated attempts, officials in the KESC could not be contacted for comment.
