Panaji: The state cabinet on Thursday granted approval for deletion of 9,525 ghost consumer records present in the current billing system of Goa electricity department (GED) and nullify arrears amounting to Rs 12.2 crore pertaining to the ghost consumers.The GED has 34 billing subdivisions. Previously, the billing activity of each subdivision was carried out separately and manually. The billing process for division 1, Panaji, was digitised in 2002. However, the rest of the sub-divisions continued with the manual process of billing.In 2014, Goa Electronics Ltd (GEL) was awarded the contract of billing of all sub divisions which resulted in the digitisation of GED’s billing data.In 2015, under centralised scheme, the billing system was replaced with SAP metering, billing and collection module leading to digitisation of entire billing data with effect from Feb 2016 to March 2017. Other modules in SAP were also implementedIn this process of migration of data from GEL to SAP, the records of permanently disconnected consumers were erroneously migrated in SAP as active consumers. Also, some consumers were erroneously migrated twice from GEL to SAP system.The cabinet said as these consumers continued to remain active in SAP, bills and delay payment charges (DPC) were automatically generated, leading to accumulation of fictitious arrears. In SAP also, DPC was levied on some permanently disconnected consumers due to non-application of arrear locks in SAP, resulting in further inflation of arrears.“The detailed scrutiny by the assistant engineer along with the assistant engineer, respective section office junior engineer, head clerk and meter reader, vigilance team of the department of each sub-division, several such records were identified as untraceable consumers having no physical existence at the recorded locations,” the cabinet said.In another cabinet decision, state govt decided to allot a land admeasuring 2,729sqm land of WRD complex at Davorlim, Salcete, to Jyot- School for Children with Autism on lease for 40 years to run a school for autistic children at a rent of Rs 100 per year.
