ISLAMABAD-The Ministry of Energy has disputed the statistics quoted in the inquiry report of the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority on overbilling and termed it false, saying it is exaggerated by up to 300% in some instances. However, it has partially endorsed the report’s claims of discrepancies committed by the distribution companies (Discos) in electricity bills. 
Although Ministry of Energy termed the statistics quoted in the Nepra inquiry report false and exaggerated, the Power Division preliminary report has acknowledged that over 10 million consumers were billed over 30 days of billing cycle during the months of July and August, while 684595 consumers were issued invalid snapshots. Most of the data sets employed by NEPRA’s professionals in their respective analyses were inaccurate/invalid resulting in exaggerated and false statistics of the relevant indicators, said the preliminary report of the Ministry of Energy released here as an initial response to the NEPRA’s inquiry report. The report is preliminary based on the analysis and findings that were received from various DISCOs and Power Information Technology Company (PITC). The Ministry of Energy (Power Division) will not take the final verdict prior to the submission of the detailed findings by the independent committee, which comprises former and serving officials of the Power Division, which is due next week.
It is worth noting that in its inquiry report, National Electric Power Regulatory Authority, while holding the Discos and K-Electric responsible for charging excessive bills to millions of consumers, during July-August 2023, recommended to correct the inflated bills within one billing cycle along with taking legal action against them. The caretaker government while showing dissatisfaction over the findings had constituted a four-member committee that consists of the former officials of the Power Division to further probe the Nepra’s inquiry report in overbilling of millions of consumers and submit a report within 15 days.
Regarding the statistics quoted for the month of July, there is huge gap in the inquiry report of the Nepra, and the preliminary report of the Power Division, however there is very little difference in the statistics for the month of August. According to NEPRA, for the month of Jul-23 & Aug-23, approximately 76% and 81% of consumers were billed within the due date, however, Power Division on the other hand is of the view that the number of the consumers were 86% and 82% respectively.
Further, according to Nepra approximately 3.2 & 0.85 million consumers were affected in the month of jul-23 & Aug23 respectively, on account of slab changes, status change from protected to non-protected and status change from life-line to non-life line, but according to the Power Division it was 0.846 million and 0.825 million. Invalid snapshot during July affected 245079 consumers and in August 689,038 consumers, however the Power Division claimed 121,639 consumers were affected in July, whereas 562,856 in August.
The major reasons attributed to the discrepancy, is on account of the erroneous datasets used by the NEPRA professionals. Provided further, with the inclusion of the effect of holidays in the billing cycle (which has not been captured in NEPRA’s analysis), the actual figure comes to the tune of around 98%. According to Nepra, 3.254 million consumers were affected in the month of Jul-23 on account of slab changes, status change from protected to non-protected and status change from life-line to non-life line. However, the actualized data indicates that only approx. 0.846 million consumers were affected under the same categories, resulting in the erroneous exaggeration of said statistics by approximately 300%. According the Power Division, the cumulative impact of slab change/category change is around 0.3% of the total billing carried out for the two months.
The datasets acquired by NEPRA professionals were neither validated nor comprehensively analysed i.e. the number of affected consumers on account of slabs shifting, change of categories (Protected-Non Protected & Lifeline – Non-Lifeline), as captured under NEPRA’s inquiry report is 3.254 million and 0.846 million for the months of Jul-23 and Aug-23 respectively, depicting a discrepancy of 300% on month-on-month basis. This indicates the negligence of NEPRA professionals to even cross-validate the extreme variations in the statistics provided in their report and defies the basic principles of data analysis and validations. This is further substantiated by the fact that the summary statistics of data shared by PITC were not shared with DISCOs for cross-verification who is in fact the actual owners of the data sets.
NEPRA in its report has assumed the billing cycle of 30 days for the month of Jul-23 and Aug-23 whereas in actual, the total number of days for the respective months are 31 each, said the Power Division.   Similarly according to Nepra, approximately 8 million consumers were affected on account of extended billing beyond 30 days for the month of July-23. However, the actualized dataset indicates that approximately 4.5 million consumers witnessed the extended billing period beyond 31 days, out of which 4 million consumers were billed within the period of 32-34 days. It is pertinent to mention here that NEPRA’s analysis did not capture the billing process and ground realities, inter-alia, weekends, gazette holidays and other factors i.e. as already explained in the billing methodology’s section, meter readings are taken only on weekdays. For example, the month of July-23 witnessed five weekends and a gazette holiday. This resulted in the spillover of the billing cycle to the subsequent working days for certain consumers whose billing date falls in the said holidays.   Accepting the Nepra version of the total overaged defective meters of 381,510, the Power Division has attributed it to the non-participation of vendors in tenders, and delays in opening of Letter of Credits due to the overall countrywide economic crisis. 
In conclusion, the Power Division said that the data sets employed by NEPRA’s professionals in their respective analyses were inaccurate/invalid resulting in exaggerated and false statistics of the relevant indicators. The report suffers from issues of quality control and arithmetic & data processing errors, an unrepresentative and biased random sampling approach was utilized by the professionals of NEPRA which is in contravention to the fundamental concept and practices adopted for the purpose of random sampling, the consideration of the ground realities and operational constraints of the distribution business, inter-alia, weekends & gazette holidays, feeder bifurcations, etc. were not incorporated in the due process of analysis. Lack of robust exploratory data analysis and absence of cross-validation mechanism in the inquiry report mislead the focus to the applicable billing process and resulted in sensationalism.