March 4, 2006	Saturday	Safar 3, 1427

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RAWALPINDI, March 3: Utility services routinely threaten their consumers with “disconnection” if payment of the bills is delayed but give no thought to what a nerve-wrecking exercise paying a bill is.

People have to stand for hours in long queues to pay their bills and this trauma they have to undergo at least four times in a month.

Users of electricity, gas, telephone and municipal water receive their bills at intervals and have to spend hours at banks to pay them on different dates.

“It defies imagination that one has to spend so much time to pay — not to receive — money,” said Mr Iqbal standing in a queue of 150 people outside a bank in Sadiquabad waiting for their turn to reach the counter to pay their bills. “I hope to reach the counter before ‘Closed’ sign goes up there. Otherwise I will be here again for a long wait,” he said.

Absence of good commercial sense in collecting dues from the public was more evident in the government departments, he said. But the profit-driven corporate sector services were supposed to make it easy for the consumers to pay their bills.

Usually, there is only one cashier at a single counter in a bank to collect utility bills and at the same time he does other things too and the hapless people go on waiting agonisingly.

Even women are not free from the trouble — the ‘ladies first’ tradition notwithstanding.

Najma complained she had already been in the queue for an hour to pay her gas bill. Her husband had given the chore to her as his job hours were same as the banking hours. “There must be separate counter for women to pay bills,” she demanded.

The people in the queue said consumers were allowed to pay their bills in post office in the past but the facility had been withdrawn causing more problems to the people.