The Power Division on Tuesday issued an initial report responding to an inquiry that had alleged all distribution companies (DISCOs) in the country had overbilled consumers, leading to inflated bills during July-August that triggered nationwide protests, maintaining the report contains “exaggerated and false statistics.”
Earlier this month, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) issued an inquiry report regarding excessive billing of DISCOs through delayed meter readings and faulty meters. To evaluate NEPRA’s findings, said the Power Division, it devised a two-pronged strategy directing all DISCOs to evaluate and provide detailed analyses on the assumptions, process and findings of the inquiry report, as well as forming an independent and impartial committee to review the basis/assumptions, methodology and findings of the report.
In light of the gathered data, read the ministry’s findings, most of the data sets employed by NEPRA were inaccurate or invalid, resulting in exaggerated and false statistics. The NEPRA report, it added, suffered from issues of quality control and arithmetic and data processing errors. “An unrepresentative and biased random sampling approach was utilized by the professionals of NEPRA, which is in contravention to the fundamental concept and practices adopted for the purpose of random sampling,” it said, adding the report had ignored a consideration of ground realities and operational constraints of DISCOs, including weekends and gazette holidays, feeder bifurcations. As such, it maintained, a billing period could reach up to 34 days.
In this situation, claimed the report, consumers are compensated the following month. However, this fails to account that some consumer categories who breach a monthly consumption slab in a month cannot avail the subsidized slab for the next six months, ensuring they are also overbilled in subsequent months.
“Lack of robust exploratory data analysis and absence of cross-validation mechanism in the inquiry report misled the focus to the applicable billing process and resulted in sensationalism,” it claimed, adding NEPRA’s quoted statistics on the number of overbilled consumers was “not correct.” As an example, it said, approximately 86 percent of consumers were billed within the due date in July, while NEPRA had said around 76 percent were.
“With the inclusion of the effect of holidays in the billing cycle (which has not been captured in NEPRA’s analysis and has been explained … in the existing billing design), the actual figure comes to around 98 percent,” it said. Noting NEPRA’s data had suggested 3.2 million consumers were affected in July due to late billing, changing their status from protected to non-protected and from lifeline to non-lifeline, it said “actualized data” indicated approximately 0.8 million consumers were actually affected.
The report conceded only two parts of the NEPRA inquiry report were correct: the conduct of its inquiry as a regulator; and the “recovery ratio of the total volume of the detection bills charged by the DISCOs to the consumers.”