The Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) has clarified that it has not hired any private courier service for distribution of electricity bills to its consumers. A press release issued by the KESC here on Friday said that the TCS had been given the job of managing the printing of the newly introduced improved-quality bills only, while the KESC's own distributors would continue to deliver the bills to consumers as before.
Referring to a news item titled: "KESC hires TCS as official courier," appeared in the Business Recorder on December 4, the statement said that no amount had to be paid to the TCS as cost of being "official courier service," and the reference to such an agreement was wrong. The job is rather a part of introducing new electricity bill, and the deal made with TCS was in fact a cost-effective measure in spite of enhanced features and improved results.
The old design bills were printed by an outsource as well, data printed at KESC, which did not have modern and high-tech facilities to print the recently introduced features, the release said, and explained that the KESC had just changed the outsource, for preparing its new bill with enhanced features like all details in bigger English and Urdu fonts in laser print, a graph showing one year billed units' history, and, specifically, three machine readable barcodes carrying all previous data of each individual consumer in the bill, that would greatly help reduce the chances of mistakes and wrong entries.
Contrary to the impression presented in the said news item, the TCS would not act as KESC's courier service but in fact print blank bills, print data entries and deliver these bills to the zonal offices of KESC, which would then be distributed to all individual consumers as per the past practice.
It said that the quality of bill paper had been improved under the new arrangement. However, on the whole, quite opposite to the Business Recorder news item, the actual expenses on printing and distribution of electricity bills remained the same as before, even when the quality of service has been improved, the release added.-PR
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