Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board has decided to allow the private agencies to collect Rs.10 from each consumer for their services. Water board officials going to take bids for contract at the end of July to finalize the service providers. It may take two to three months.
Meter reader can manage a certain number of consumers under this system and these consumers are combined in to a Docket and then this is allotted to service providers.
A few months ago a system was tried. In that, one docket was allocated to a private agency in each division. It succeed so, officials decided to apply the same in all 160 divisions of the water board.
Each docket will have CANS (Consumer Account Numbers) between 1000 to 1500. All the houses will be visited by selected private agency to take readings, generating bills and collection of charges, and also it collects Rs 10 extra for the door step service. They will give the Electronic Point of Sale machines to the agencies which will be loaded with data of a docket. This system makes sure that prompt issuance of bills and revenue increase in future.
For this, the selected private agencies have to pay a deposit initially as a precautionary measure. For example deposit Rs 1 lakh has to be paid by the each agency for one EPOS. Machine gets locked when the collection amount crosses the Rs. 1 lakh. Then agency has to give back the collections to convert the EPOS to unlock.
Source: Express buzz