The Overall Problems and Prospects of Prepaid E-Metering System in Bangladesh: A Study on Dhaka City Dwellers

Abstract

Various attempts have been made to address the inconvenience of non-technical losses of electricity but none of them has proved to be completely successful in Bangladesh so far. Recently, Bangladesh Government has initiated a pre-paid e-metering system which is claimed to be a user-friendly and cost-effective option in this regard. In order to ensure its seamless operations, opinion of its end users is needed to be examined as any investment on new technology will be considered as an ultimate wastage without users’ acceptance. This paper intends to explore the overall problems and prospects of the pre-paid e-metering system installed by DESCO lately in the capital city from the users’ side. In order to do it, depth interview of 47 Dhaka city dwellers, including households and business enterprises located at Mohammadpur, Lalbagh and Hazaribagh area, was conducted. The result reveals that the users have a number of problems regarding it; mostly the unexpected billing system, lack of proper distribution network to make the service more available to users, lack of privacy protection for business users, and others. The study proposes some initiatives which can bring about some visible change if applied properly.