Kerala   

Power thieves on the prowl

K.P.M. Basheer

Drive against power theft shows that central Kerala is the hub of the crime Power theft, a relatively recent trend in Kerala, is emerging as a white-collar crime. It is usually the well-off who steal power. They hire professional tamperers, whose fee ranges from Rs.1,000 to Rs.50,000, to manipulate the power consumption meters. The Kerala State Electricity Board has more than eight million consumers and tampering with electronic meters is hard to detect.

TARGET OF POWER THIEVES: An electronic power consumption meter. Photo: H. Vibhu

A few weeks ago, the Kerala State Electricity Board's (KSEB) anti-power theft squad detected that the electronic power consumption meter in the Kochi home of a KSEB trade union leader, who had earlier headed a Government company, was tampered with.

A rival union tipped off the squad. The board slapped a penal bill of Rs.1.48 lakhs on her and within 24 hours she paid up. In a few days after the detection of the union leader's power theft, the squad caught two Kochi youths who had turned manipulation of power meters into a profession. They together had helped about 500 power consumers— households, hotels, factories, hospitals and businesses— to drastically cut their power bills by cheating on the KSEB. They used to charge anything from Rs.1,000 to Rs.50,000 from each of the beneficiaries. The two had earlier been contract workers for the board and had access to hundreds of meters. Their bank balances, totalling Rs.30 lakhs, gave an indication of the extent of their operations and the loss they caused to the KSEB, a senior board official told The Hindu.

In the following few days, the eight squads in the State, working under KSEB's Vigilance chief Rishi Raj Singh, caught 15 more professional `tamperers.' One of them had earlier been working for a power-meter manufacturer and had left the company on voluntary retirement scheme. A KSEB sub-engineer at Thodupuzha was found to have helped consumers to cheat on the board: fake meter seals were seized found from his home. One tamperer in the Thiruvananthapuram area, who is an expert in reversing meter readings, has been nicknamed `Reverse Aboobacker.'

A new trend

Power theft— widespread in many other States, but rare in Kerala until recently— has emerged as a key source of revenue loss to the KSEB. The first major case of large-scale organised power theft was detected last year at Kanjikode, the industrial heartland of Palakkad district. High-tension and extra-high-tension consumers there had cheated on the board for long. Following this, the board took a series of steps to check power theft by factories and industrial units.

However, the recent drive to nab power thieves showed that central Kerala, particularly Kochi city, is the hub of the theft. In just a day's raid in Kochi on June 23, 19 instances of power theft by households and shops were detected. This amounted to Rs.10 lakhs. The board's anti-power theft drive is focussed on Kochi. After the squad publicised the names of power thieves, board officials in the city said, they were getting calls from several consumers saying that there were "some problems" with their meters and that they were ready to pay the differential bills. Some even gave out the names of the tamperer who had helped them to cheat on the board. Others tipped off the board on power-cheating neighbours.

In just a month from May 18 to June 17, the squad officials detected 266 cases of power theft across the State. These mainly included businesses like supermarkets, showrooms, hotels, restaurants and hospitals. Among the thieves were owners of posh houses which even boasted lifts and swimming pools. An executive engineer said that it was mainly the well-off households that tended to cheat. Penal bills totalling Rs.2.14 crores were slapped on them. For every theft detected and publicised, there are 10 voluntary disclosures, officials said.

Officials pointed out that last year (2005-06), the board's Aggregate Technical and Commercial Loss was 24.8 per cent of the revenue; power theft caused a sizeable chunk of this loss. They said there were some 82 lakh power consumers in the State and keeping tab on them was just impossible. Random check was the only possible way.

Generally, because of the fear of damage to personal and business reputations as well as power disconnection, the cheats own up their offences and pay up the penal bills without much fuss.

Tamperable meter

Board engineers say that it was after the electronic power meters became commonplace that power theft shot up. The board is replacing the mechanical meters on a war footing— last year eight lakh new meters were installed. While the electronic meters improved the board's efficiency and made power billing smoother, it also opened up avenues for cheating. Engineers point out that for those who are familiar with the functioning of the meter, especially of the cheap ones, which the board now uses, there are innumerable ways to manipulate it. Most of these are hard to detect, even for experienced engineers, let alone the lineman who takes the consumption reading. Two common methods are manipulating the resistors and the counters inside the meters. Where there is a three-phase connection, getting one or two phases out of the meter's reckoning is one way of cheating. Some factories even use remote-controller to periodically stall the functioning of the meter and thus save on power bill— some ice-making units were caught doing this.

High-end household consumers as well as high-tension and extra-high-tension users who are mainly business and industrial units, the squad sources said, generally resort to meter-tampering. The board, they said, was taking several steps to tackle them.

One executive engineer in the distribution wing of the board pointed out that the permanent solution to the theft was to use improved technology. Centralised data collection and centralised consumption monitoring were essential for distribution management. "A click of the mouse will show how much power a consumer has used and the lineman does not need to go to every houses every two months to take the reading," he said. By employing trend management, officials in the control room can find out the variations in the power consumption pattern of each consumer and single out those with huge variations for inspection.

He also suggested using tamper-proof meters, which are expensive, for those consuming more than 10 kW a month. "Anyhow, the board is charging a rent on the meters," he noted. "Why cannot the board go in for a high-quality tamper-proof meters for high-end consumers and recover the cost from them?" The meters used at present cost only Rs.250 a piece and the board charges a rent of Rs.10 a month, which according to him, is `outrageous.' He also said the power tariff for HT and EHT consumers is very high which needed to be reduced. "The high cost of power is a factor that induces people to commit theft, " he said.

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