Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Limited - Bangalore

The power supply in Bangalore city is awful. Even during this monsoon season, there are lot of unscheduled power cuts. No authority is bothered but the state government is always keen to jack up the charges to astronomical figures. It seems to have no power policy to implement.

------- Edited on 2019-05-13 -------

First of all, there are too many unscheduled power cuts. There is no way to complain in case of long power cuts. BESCOM has published their helpline number 1912 for complaints. But that number is always busy. The BESCOM MITHRA app is also not very helpful. It is useful only for paying the electricity bills. I'm not able to lodge the complaints on the app at all.

------- Edited on 2016-10-07 -------

Keep up the good work.
Can the power cuts be reduced and made as a thing of the past.

I live in Bangalore and the local utility is Bangalore Electric Supply Company (BESCOM). This is the new avatar of the older utility - KEB (Karnataka Electricity Board). My observations on the various aspects of BESCOM, from a consumer viewpoint are: (1) Metering, Billing and Payment - Good, the meter reading is on a fixed date, irrespective of the day of the week, the billing is transparent and payment is simple, both online and at their counters or through BangaloreOne. Only the rates are high ! (2) Supply - DAILY outages, especially during the monsoons due to tree falling on power lines, transformer bursts or short-circuiting. It appears that BESCOM (lovingly renamed as Blinking Electric Supply COMpany) believes only in "breakdown maintenance" and not in "preventive maintenance", and emergency rectification done at night is not properly completed the next day, in daylight. BESCOM Staff insist on being "compensated" for their services - surely they get their salary from BESCOM ! Outages are not properly communicated - sometimes the outage is unplanned, and their Call Center (1912) is not even aware - the standard response is either surprise when informed or the usual "we are working on it", and the Call Center executive is courteous and multi-lingual, unlike the technicians who speak only in a gruff dialect of Kannada, making it very obvious that their presence is a boon to the complainant, that they have many other complaints to attend and have condescended to attend to the specific complaint only for pecuniary gratification. (3) Basic Obligation to the consumer - BESCOM is mandated to supply quality power to its contracted consumer, with minimal interruption and of consistent quality (220V to 240V - no more, no less). However, their Mission statement is more focused on profits, employee satisfaction (why not, the customers are paying for 'perks' !!) and a motherhood statement on use of latest technology and best practices, with a fleeting reference to customer satisfaction and an aspiration to developing infrastructure commensurate with growth. Not sure how much this has percolated to the O&M staff, who are still in the time-wrap of the "good-old-KEB-days" (I have seen both versions, KEB & now BESCOM - old wine, new bottle). Why does a consumer get the impression that the utility is doing her/him a favor of somehow supplying power? And should you miss the due date for payment - the collection 'agents' of credit-card / loan companies will appear as angels in comparison to the Commercial Staff of BESCOM. Conclusion - we are "fortunate and honored" to have power most of the time, ready to shell out to the O&M staff in case of outages in / around our residence or grin and bear it for outages in some other, contiguous locality (since the power distribution does not allow for localizing the fault by isolating the specific circuit, but instead the entire neighborhood is blacked out), pay our bills on time (or else...you know...) and pay dearly (with annual increases in tariff) for this highly inefficient utility. Amen!!!

when India has surplus power, Karnataka is suffering from power failures. I don't blame KPTCL entirely for that. Political will is required to get power from center grid.