Vasanth - 24 September, 2013 | Bangalore | egovernance | BESCOM | Citizen Reports | egovernance

Today morning I had suprise visitors to my home from Bescom. Two men in a scooter, one person ready to remove the electric fuse at home. They came and suddenly asked for the receipt of last month's electricity bill. I had kept it somewhere and had to search all over home. Meanwhile that person was telling if you are unable to show the receipt, I will remove the fuse to put pressure on me so that I search faster. So I questioned him back what happened to the data in your Bescom's computer where my last month's payment was recorded. He simply said 'it is lost and that is why we are here'. They said they are manually going to everyhome, checking for the receipt of previous month, if not shown, removing the fuse

Meanwhile I found the receipt  and after showing it to him they went off. Everyone around home were struggling to find the receipt. This happened in S9 Sub Division beloning to Katriguppe. Had I not shown my receipt, I had to run from pillar to post to prove that I had already made payment or after having got tired, pay the bill once more.

I was wondering how careless is BESCOM on a Billing Database. I am not sure if it is local / central. But loosing Bill Payment Data, how criminal is this. If it would have been a MNC, DBA and the systems team would have been definitely laid off.

The state in which data is maintained in Government offices is miserable. There is no value for it. Probably this is done deliberately so that they can tweak around to do corruption and say data loss. That is why we are seeing all the scams going around. I heard that even the data related to Aadhar was lost and many people did not get their Aadhar cards. 

Government also invites tenders and gives it to cheap bidder. Also, tenders are made so that it is favourable to X or Y company. These incompetent companies who do every 'circus' to get the tender, will not spend same on their employees. They hire employees who cost them least and know just 'ABCs' of any technology.

My question is why isn't Supreme Court / High Courts issuing a directive saying that data in Government offices to be maintained in a secured datacentre with a disaster recovery site and the database be maintained by a standard or SEI CMM Level 5 company There should be a benchmark. Bangalore's  Engineers manage databases across the world, but when it comes to Bangalore's own data, it is not managed by Bangalore's competent Engineers.

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