FOR months now, rumours have been swirling that the new meters being installed by the power distribution companies run faster than the old ones.

People have reported receiving higher bills the moment the new meters are installed. Now we have a letter written on government letterhead, sent to the chief executive officer of the Lahore Electric Supply Company from the Prime Minister’s Inspection Commission asking for details regarding this issue. In the days to come, the same letter will be sent out to CEOs of other distribution companies as well.

“It has been learnt that in the last few years 2012-13, old meters have been exchanged by the new one [sic] which runs at least 30-35pc faster,” says the letter.

It goes on to list a number of problems with the meters and their speed, which in some cases is faster and in others “slower than standard”, meaning the commission sees large-scale defects in the manner in which the sale of electricity at the final point of consumption is being measured.

Rumours of the new meters being faster than the standard ones might be corroborated by the data available with the commission, but it is a little too early to say exactly what information they are acting on.

The letter raises some important questions. For instance, it is far from clear how they became aware of this problem in the first place. Is the commission simply investigating the rumours that have been circulating for a while now, or do they have more extensive information to suggest that there are defects in the new meters? If the former is true, we cannot say much until the findings have been reported. But if it is the latter, then we need to know how it is that the commission chose to act on this problem before the water and power ministry did.

The water and power minister appears to have been taken by surprise since the letter has arrived in the middle of an audit being run by three different companies on the state of billing in the power sector.

No doubt he will feel that the commission ought to have waited till this audit was complete before raising fresh concerns on their own initiative. But the problems in the hardware are not being investigated under the audit.

The government needs to realise that the problems in the power sector are large, and comparable to, if not larger in scope than, the problems that plagued public-sector banks in the 1990s. What is required is a strong and coherent response under a unified authority.

Piecemeal actions under multiple authorities reinforce the impression that the government is fumbling through this matter which was such an important part of their election campaign. Time is running out. And very soon, people will start using the same language to describe this government’s response to the power crisis as they used for the previous one.

Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2014