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Geetanjali Krishna: For the 'right' connection

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Geetanjali Krishna New Delhi
So I had no option but to throw an aunty across the wire again," 20-year old Deepak said as I stared in astonishment. He'd been telling me about his frustrating experience applying for an electricity connection from BSES.
 
But surely that didn't give him the licence to throw sundry aunts around, just to get the attention of the electricity behemoth? Then of course, I realised that he meant "unti", not "aunty" "" like "tanka", it's the local lingo for the most common method of power theft.
 
Deepak's account of his battle with BSES was particularly piquant as it wasn't at all clear which of them had been left with the shorter end of the stick.
 
Six years ago, his family bought a house in Kondli, east Delhi, and found that the meter there had a bill of about Rs 70,000 pending on it. The family decided that it would be easier (and cheaper, naturally) to just steal power from the main line that ran behind their home instead of trying to get the pending bill nullified.
 
In the past six years, the few inspectors who came to inspect the status of the power lines running through their neighbourhood, returned relatively richer and all was well.
 
But in the past few months, rumours of more serious raids had been running rife in Kondli. Deepak panicked when he realised that the pending amount had become even more "The only thing I could think of was to yank the meter out completely, and throw it in the garbage.
 
In the mean time, I put in an application for a new connection, declaring that we'd just shifted into this house that had no meter," said Deepak. I was awestruck at the criminal mind that lay behind his cheerfully innocent face. "All I needed to do was to butter up the neighbours so that they'd corroborate our story that we'd just moved in," he said.
 
That done, he applied for a fresh connection from the BSES. More inspectors went to his home to verify his application. As always, they were plied with tea, snacks and a hundred rupee note each. When they left, they assured Deepak that his application would be passed. Deepak was relieved: "It was good to know that soon we wouldn't have to dread these raids or give money every time the inspectors passed our lane," said he.
 
A devious friend told him he knew someone who could "fix" the meter to only show the minimum reading every month. "That made me even happier, for I'd be paying the smallest possible price for my peace of mind," said Deepak.
 
But things are never that simple in real life. When he went to check the status of his application the next day, he was shocked to find that it had been rejected by the BSES on the grounds that his ration card number showed that there was yet another meter registered at his address, but in a stranger's name.
 
Repeated visits, entreaties and applications yielded no results. The records, funnily, didn't bring up any mention of the meter that he'd uprooted and thrown away.
 
Looking every inch the victim, he spoke of the flak he was getting at home (his father still believes that stealing power is better than paying for it) and at work (he has to take off from work to make the daily pilgrimage to the BSES office).
 
"This is what I got for wanting to do things right!" said he, "the BSES will suffer more than us, though "" for as long as we can hook another "unti" to the mains, we'll be ok waiting for the connection!"

 
 

Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

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First Published: Oct 01 2005 | 12:00 AM IST

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