BENGALURU: After the registration for the Gruha Jyothi free eletricity scheme was opened, the number of applicants is now touching one crore. Due to the rush in the initial days, the government had encountered issues with its servers, but after they were sorted out, there is not much of a rush for submitting applications online.
In the early days when the registration was opened, there were long queues at BangaloreOne and GramaOne centres, Nada Kacheris and the Escom office and people had to wait long hours. However, the queues for registration have come down now.
The Energy Department has identified 2.14 crore households which can benefit from the Gruha Jyothi scheme, but only one crore have enlisted so far. Bescom managing director Mahantesh Bilagi said, “Over 99 lakh power consumers have registered for the Gruha Jyothi scheme and we expect it to cross one crore on Thursday. The E-governance Department fixed all the glitches that were encountered in the initial days and registration is faster now. But the number of registrations have come down from the earlier 10 lakh per day to around 2 lakh per day”.
Further, he said that though no last date has been fixed for registration, he appealed to consumers to do so at the earliest. “Registrations are going on smoothly and complaints have dropped to just one or two for every one or two lakh applications. In cases where consumers are getting messages that say ‘Account ID does not exist’, they can register at the subdivision offices”, he said.
The officer explained that where a consumer has more than one connection in his name, the scheme benefit will be available to only one connection as per the government’s orders. Those trying to cheat will be identified during field visits, he pointed out.