NOIDA: The power department has hired a new agency to calculate the bills of consumers in a manner that doesn't require any manual intervention by meter readers.Earlier, collusion between consumers and meter readers, especially in rural areas, resulted in generating fake bills, said officials of PVVNL.While this caused a loss of revenue to the PVVNL, genuine consumers too have been complaining about bills of lesser amount being issued to other customers due to corruption by meter readers.According to PVVNL officials, the company officials will be tasked with connecting individual meters with a port cable which will help transfer all the data to the server of the department, enabling the power department employees access the exact meter reading and units consumed by the consumer.Sanjay Jain, chief engineer (commercial), PVVNL told TOI that when the meter readers of the company go to the houses of the consumers, they will be tasked with collection of data from the spot and transfer it to the PVVNL's server."The officials will be able to see the exact meter reading. Earlier, the meter readers would manually feed the reading in the mobile application. This would lead to controversies as the meter readers would at times enter lower readings than the actual and feed smaller numbers in the application. There was no procedure to check these readings. The new system will remove their interference," he said.Jain said that the department will first start with the new process in the rural areas and later expand the same to the urban areas.According to PVVNL, there are nearly 91,000 consumers of the power discom in the rural belt including Dadri and Jewar while the urban area of Noida has about 1,50,000 consumers.SK Verma, chief engineer, PVVNL, Gautam Budh Nagar told TOI that they are waiting for an official copy of the agreement."We have been informed about the changes but are waiting for a copy of the agreement. The new system will start from September 1," he said. The new billing system will begin in 14 districts of the state including Gautam Budh Nagar and Ghaziabad.

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