BSNL rings in a shocker with trunk calls bill

CHANDIGARH: How much time does it take for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited to correct a snag in its billing software?
May sound strange, but the corporation took almost a year to correct a fault in its Trichur billing package that is used for preparing telephone bills of subscribers falling under the Chandigarh secondary switching area, covering Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula and Kharar.
Result: Hundreds of BSNL subscribers availing the corporation’s trunk call facility have received bills for June-July, wherein they have been charged for all the trunk calls made since August 2002.
Subscribers had not been charged for the trunk calls made since August 2002 in the earlier bills as the billing software was not registering the calls.
Many of the subscribers have received bills running into four to five pages with amount as high as Rs 20,000. Says a subscriber, “A household normally keeps a specific amount aside for paying the telephone bill. It is very difficult to pay such a huge amount in one go.�
Subscribers are also facing the problem of verifying the numbers given in the bill. “With such a long list of numbers, it becomes very difficult to check each and every call,� says another subscriber.
Apart from the problems being faced by the subscribers, BSNL at its end has also lost out on the interest on the billed amount, which it could have earned if the bills were collected in time.
BSNL officials say that the records of trunk calls made during the period were stored in floppies and now that the software has been corrected, the subscribers have been charged for the earlier calls.
But what took the corporation so long to correct the fault? Says BSNL accounts officer Kuldeep Ram, who is also in charge of preparing the bills, “I was posted here in April 2003. So, I do not know what had happened prior to that.�
BSNL general manager finance Namita Sekhon, however, says that the corporation had been trying to rectify the situation all this while. “We had been trying to correct the fault, but the process is not so simple.�
She says that the corporation was not fully satisfied with its earlier attempts at correction.
“We have different types of exchanges using different technologies. The software has to be updated for all these exchanges to ensure uniformity in the billing system. We did not want to go ahead with partial rectification of the system,� the GM said.
BSNL general manager, finance, Namita Sekhon said that in case of bills involving large amounts, they were thinking of giving an option of making payment in installments, if individuals asked for it.