CESC reports collecting 82% of electricity bills through digital payment

CESC Ltd, RP Sanjiv Goenka's flagship company, on Tuesday said it has seen a tremendous increase in digital payments, with 82 per cent of its total revenue from electricity bill collection coming from online mode.

The company provides a discount of one per cent for digital payment.

"Thanks to a wide variety of user-friendly online payment options, 74.5 per cent of (total 3.5 million) consumers made online payments in 2022-23, which constituted almost 82 per cent of total revenues," its chairman Sanjiv Goenka said in a message to investors.

CESC provided over 1,06,101 new connections in 2022-23.

West Bengal Power Minister Aroop Biswas had slammed the power during the recent heat waves for a series of power disruptions under its command area.

Distribution of electricity, with its own generation facilities, across its licensed area is in Kolkata, Howrah, Hooghly, North and South 24 Parganas districts.

With a return to normalcy in 2022-23, your company's system demand grew at 8.7 per cent during the year to 11,175 million units (MU) in 2022-23, the RP Sanjiv Goenka group chairman said.

Electricity demand in 2022-23 surpassed the pre-Covid level of 11,024 MU in 2019-20.

Despite electricity tariffs remaining unchanged during the year, your company's total income on a standalone basis (revenue from operations plus other income) increased by 9 per cent to Rs 8,153 crore in 2022-23.

Operating costs increased during the year, largely on account of high fuel costs. Profit after tax (PAT) increased by about 2 per cent to Rs 830 crore.