BMC pushes for new water billing software

MUMBAI: A decade ago, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) modernized water billing by introducing a piece of software. Today, it is planning to make substantial changes in it to make the billing process for metered water connections a consumer-friendly process.
To bring in the changes, the BMC has roped in engineers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, as advisors.
Confirming the development, Rajiv Jalota, additional municipal commissioner, told TOI, “We are planning to bring changes to the water billing software. Our focus will be on addressing the grievances of consumers as far as water bills are concerned.”
While tests are underway, the BMC says it will take more than a year for the upgraded software to be introduced. The reason it cites for this is that old data available with the hydraulic department will have to be integrated with the new software.
Since the billing process at present is a much-criticized one, the upgraded software would be designed keeping in mind consumer needs. Till date, the BMC does not have a proper redress cell. After the software is developed, people can register complaints online. After a complaint is registered in the server, it will send automatic instructions to the terminal at the complainant’s end for a ticket to be issued; the ticket will be a physical record of the complaint and can also be used to monitor its status. At present, the BMC has no system for monitoring complaints. A civic official said that after the software upgrade, this problem will be taken care of and the time taken to address a complaint can be monitored. “Such a system is already functioning in Hyderabad,” a senior official said.
A key feature that would be added to the software is spot billing. This will enable the water supply department to immediately issue bills after taking metre readings. “At present, after a reading, it takes 15-20 days for the bill to be issued,” the official said. “If we can manage to start the spot-billing system, it will be of great help to consumers. Once this feature is activated, the metre reading data can be fed into the software, which will process the bill instantly. The bill will be fed into our main server for a permanent record.”