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Not many meters faulty, says DERC

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI OCT. 29. Over-ruling a large number of complaints and grievances of hard-pressed domestic power consumers about malfunctioning of newly-installed electronic meters, the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission today gave a clean chit to the power discoms, claiming that all was fine and the higher bills were mainly because the old meters had become slow and outdated over the years.

At a Press conference here, the DERC Chairman, V. K. Sood, said as many as 91 per cent of the electronic meters tested were within the prescribed limits of the Indian Electricity Act.

Following large-scale complaints from consumers, the Commission tested 372 electronic meters, which were randomly picked from the stores of the three discoms, he said. Nearly two per cent of these metres were found to be slow and 0.5 per cent faster than the prescribed limits. About five per cent of them - all from the TTL Metres -- were found to be defective. The Commission has directed the BSES Rajdhani Power Limited and BSES Yamuna Power Limited, which had procured about 2,500 metres from TTL metres, to get them replaced, Mr. Sood said.

Testing of the electronic metres were done by a Committee headed by the DERC Director (Technical), V. J. Talwar, having the expertise of testing electric metres of the New Delhi Municipal Council in the early 60s. Among the other members of the Committee set up in August included representatives from discoms -- BSES and North Delhi Power Limited -- and Common Cause, a nongovernmental organisation. Mr. Sood said the Committee was set up to resolve the issue of metres since there was a fear in the minds of the consumers that their metres were running fast.

Mr. Sood said the metres were tested at a laboratory set up recently at the Commission's premises at Malviya Nagar. The standard of the laboratory was independently verified by some industries, he claimed. In the next phase, "we would be testing installed electronic metres,'' he added.

Giving details of the report of the Committee, Mr. Sood said of the 362 metres tested, as many as 332 were observed to be within the prescribed limit, 17 were defective, six were slow, four jumped and one was fast. These metres were of various make, Actaris, L &T, Namtech, TTL and Elymer.

Besides TTL metres, all of which were found to be defective, the metres of Elymer, which were procured by the erstwhile Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB), were found to be of sub-standard. "The performance of remaining metre brands were found to be satisfactory,'' he said.

The report also revealed that of the three discom, almost all the metres of the Tata Power-managed North Delhi Power Limited were found to be within the prescribed limits.

"If we do not consider the metres of TTL, the percentage of correct metres would be much higher,'' Mr. Sood said.

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