Capital Development Authority (CDA) had to pay over Rs 300 million on account of miscalculated streetlights for the last decade, exposing flagrant negligence of the authority’s finance managers.
The cash strapped authority was supposed to pay bills for 42,500 streetlights, but it made payments for 65,000 streetlights across the federal capital, inflicting a loss of over Rs 300 million, an official document revealed.
CDA pays for streetlights on an estimated basis with no meters installed to show exact units. It had been paying the lump sum of one billion rupees annually instead of Rs 653 million for the exact number of lights fittings. Recently, as part of a drive to conduct an energy audit of Islamabad, CDA’s Street Lights Directorate counted the number of streetlights and revealed that there were around 42,500 light fittings in the city instead of 65,000 as CDA had estimated.
“This would require negotiations with IESCO for a reduction in the electricity bill,” said a CDA official.
He said that CDA ends up by paying a large sum of around Rs 1.5 billion a year on the account of electricity consumption, out of which street lights had a major share of around Rs 1 billion on an estimated basis.
The official said that unmetered streetlights in the city had always been a bone of contention between CDA and IESCO over billing matters, as the former wanted to minimize expenditure, while the latter desired to maximize receipts.
He opined that if meters were installed on lights fittings, the billed amount could be reduced substantially because a considerable number of polls either remained off or did not even exist. He said that IESCO had expressed the inability to install meters due to high load on a single circuit.
He added that an effort had been made in 2000 by Army Monitoring Teams, who had installed meters through IESCO that had resulted in a reduction of bills, but later those meters either burned out or were stolen and the billing was reverted to an estimated basis again.
Earlier this year, CDA had invited firms to conduct an energy audit of streetlights to reduce bills. The official said that the government had now launched an energy conservation drive that had resulted in switching off more polls, and that called for another round of negotiations with IESCO for the reduction of bills.
He said that CDA was considering calling for proposals from firms with stringent terms of reference and the authority would prefer firms which had already dealt with IESCO.