How I quit the crowds and learned to love late fees

For the last year I have been at war with the electricity board of Tamil Nadu. I chalk it up to cultural miscommunication, they chalk it up to me being an all around non-bill paying delinquent. Every two months on the 15th a meterman drops by my apartment snoops around the electrical box and makes a note of how much electricity that I have used. He is supposed to write it down on an government issued electricity ration card so that I have a record of the reading, but more often than not I am not home to give it to him and my aging and mostly blind guardsman never picks it up from me. The ration card stands in for a what I consider a normal electricity bill--the kind that arrives in the mail--and without a notation there is nothing to tell you when you actually have to pay. And I usually don't. At least not on time.

Instead of bill dates, everyone just seems to know that you need to run across town to the electricity board building and pay them in cash before the 15th of the next month. If you don't the next time the meter man drops by he will cut your power. This happened to me in September (and every month thereafter) when my first fights with the electric company began.

Paying the bill at the electricity board is no easy task. Invariably when I show up there is a line that stretches around the block and it can easily take four house in the hot sun just to give a man behind a glass window money.

So after about six months of trial and error I've finally figured out the trick for paying the electricity bill with as little hassle as possible. It involves a few late charges, a little expertise as an electrician and a sneaky way to avoid the insurmountably long lines.

While I am never able to catch the meter man when he is on the premisis, I am invariably home when he ends up cutting my power. Since power outs are common in this part of town I usually don't think much of it, but after the power has been out over an hour (or if I hear my neighbor's TV) I march down to my power box to fix the problem. In the United States when the electricity company shuts down your power they usually do so by pressing a button on some centralized computer in another part of the country. Here in Tamil Nadu it's not quite that sophisticated. In stead of a person at a call center managing your power, the meterman simply disconnects one of the yellow wires at the bottom of my meter (usually the one on the far right side--see photo) and flips the main power switch for the apartment.

To reconnect the power I just wait for the meter man to leave and then plug the lead wire back in. Presto. The lights are back on and I have two more months of power.

Of course, I don't want to steal electricity, I just want to have a way of knowing when to pay the bill. So after a bit of procrastinating (usually about a month) I make my way down the the electricity board which sits on a busy intersection about a mile from my house. Most times of the month there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people holding their electricity ration cards in their hands and waiting to pay their bills. I've waited in those lines before and it can take a very long time before the men and women behind the window stop jabbering with one another, finish their twelfth tea break and finally get around to processing payments. It makes paying a electricity bill the same as a monthly visit to the DMV.
Not wanting to wait in the nightmare line (see photo above) I have come up with a way to skirt the whole issue. Like everything in this country, there are several levels of bureaucracy that you have to deal with when interacting with the government. And despite the huge lines, there are three or four workers behind the glass counters who sit around and do nothing all day because no one needs their specific bureaucratic skills. There are three lines for paying your bill on time, a line for fines, a line for late bills and a line for general inquiries.

That majority of people have come to pay their bills on time and thus have to wait around forever to get processed. However, as a delinquent bill payer I have the luxury of scooting ahead of everyone and going to my own delinquent bill payer window.
So while everyone of India's upstanding citiziens gets to stand in lengthy lines, I get to scoot past them all and pay a nominal (60 rupee) fine for not paying on time and get away from the bloody mess in just a few minutes.

Now I'm sure that this is not the system that the Indian government intended to create for bill payment, but it is by far the easiest one that I have come by yet. Not only do I avoid lines, but I don't need to wait around my house for three days in the middle of the month to catch the meterman as he threatens to turn off my power.

Today I paid my last two month's bill for 1800 rupees, and still had time to write this post. I think the people in the photographs above as still waiting for their agent to finish their tea.