I could probably write a small book about how messed up DHBVN is. No one in DHBVN offices accept documents properly. No one would sign them. No one would stamp them. As a result, you have no proof that a complaint or a representation was submitted.
None of the people responsible for doing actual work would do it directly. Everyone has a designated tout who would be found roaming around the respective areas where he would behave like a government employee. He would give you his rates for getting a job done which would be 20-40% more than the official price.
You can of course follow the proper course to get the job done at official price. But that would require you to take leaves from offices several times. Visit the office and hope to find the guy in charge sitting in his chair during the few hours he is in office and hope that he accepts your application and process it.
We have been trying for months to get subsidy for the solar water heater we got installed 1.5 year ago. Have submitted the required papers three times. Still no subsidy.
Gurgaon has expanded so much and is still expanding at such a pace that these people do not even hire enough guys to deliver the bills on time. I remember an incident where I was standing in the office of a senior guy. A lady was in argument with him because her bill was not delivered at all and she was now being forced to pay late charges. The guy admitted that they have not yet hired a guy for her area to deliver the bills. But instead of cutting the late charges, he told her... arey madam sirf rs. 450 hi to hai. jama kara dijiye. varna penalty lagti rahegi. When the lady asks about next time, the guy said, hopefully they would have a delivery guy by that time. He suggests her to get a soft copy of the bill from the DHBVN website. Point to note here... At that period of time, DHBVN website was not providing access to soft copies because of some backend problems. The guy had no idea that the website was not working properly. I dived in and informed him about the issue. He just said... ye to chota mota issue hai. Theek ho jayega. The website was not back for another month or so to the best of my knowledge.
During the demolition of gates around our house in April, the HUDA guys conveniently managed to
damage our electricity meter. Dad and me tried to get a new meter through the proper route. Did not get any response back. In the end, we decided to pay up the tout charges so as to get the job done on priority as god knows how much excessive charges DHBVN would have pushed on us by charging on the basis of average.
Gurgaon is supposed to get a smart grid under the current BJP government. The idea is to deliver continues power supply without any cuts within the next year or so in select areas of the city. Right now, these guys cannot even generate accurate bills. Any visit to their offices would showcase the sad condition of their billing software. They took around 5 months to switch from a system that somewhat worked to a system that does not appear to work very well. And the bills are still coming inaccurately. They shifted all our meters outside our house to the electricity poles on the road. During the daytime in sunlight, it becomes pretty hard to see the digital display on these meters. As a result, their meter reading guys either take down incorrect readings or just put in meter not working in their records. And we have to make multiple visits to their offices during weekdays between 10am and 3pm (exclude the lunch hour from this of course) to get the readings corrected. We pay for their mistakes. Every freaking time. We have received incorrect bills so many times, that we consider it a miracle if a bill comes correct. Dad is now used to take readings on a fortnightly basis to keep a record of usage so as to keep an eye on the usage that comes in our bills.
I can probably mention a few more things that is fucked up with DHBVN but you probably get an idea.
PS: I should mention another incident here. Few months ago, just a few days after the implementation of the new billing system... Many people in Gurgaon receive bills in amounts of lakhs. IIRC one guy even made it to newspapers for getting a bill of more than Rs. 50 lakhs. I met one such guy in the office. The guy on the counter blamed it all on the software which was not customized properly and was creating bad bills for a lot of customers. I believe in one of the case, the system could not understand the fact that meter had rolled on to 0 after completing one complete cycle so it charged for the usage after zero to before zero. For example.... 98-02 should be four units right? The system generated a bill for 96 units instead. Well something like that.
