Nagaland becomes the first state of NE to launch Point of Sale (POS) facility for paying electricity bills

Kohima, November 17: Carving the page of history to back ‘Digital India’s’ dream, Nagaland became the first state of North East to launch Point of Sale (POS) facility for electricity bill payment, where the mode of payment will be cashless. 

Launching the POS at the Kohima electrical sub-division, Chief Secretary Pankaj Kumar acknowledged the efforts of commissioner & Secretary Power and IT&C, KD Vizo, who was instrumental in setting up the POS machine and bringing visible changes in IT&C department.

 

The POS facility would now enable the consumers to pay their electricity bills as cashless transactions has been made available to them, he added

Kumar said POS would also benefit the Power department as its staff need not be engaged in counting and handling cash any longer, except monitoring the statements, thus saving time and energy. He said this would help the department improve its revenue collection.

Stating that Power department had incurred a loss of Rs. 150 Crore approximately in the previous year, further he said there was lack of adequate support in term of resources to maintain the revenue generation system and urged both the department and consumers to come together in solving the problem. He also said this loss was one of the highest in the country.

Further, he appealed to the consumers to pay their bills on time, even if there were mistakes on them as these could be later corrected through representations. “But payment has to be on time because collection efficiency was around 65-70%, which means if a bill is prepared for Rs. 100 the department receives only Rs. 70,” he explained.

Asking the department to work on improving the billing efficiency, Kumar emphasised that unless it was done the consumer would not be able to pay bills on time and ultimately the department would incur losses. He also stressed improving the distribution system that could improve the department’s overall fiscal health.

Nagaland became the first State in Northeast to introduce POS mode for payment of electricity bills and that the platform would be convenient for the consumers, he added.