The introduction of prepaid metering not only refrained from assisting the municipalities in improving their revenue status but also, more often than not, accelerated the revenue erosion.
First, the widely known fact that organised rackets found ways to circumvent the system through illegal prepaid charging tokens. The municipalities get zero revenue out of these illegal tokens, thereby depriving them of their rightful share. Thereafter, illegal tampering became prevalent within pockets of the municipality’s area of supply.
Though many municipalities can detect those accounts without any purchases or too low purchases, there are unfortunately no systems to detect the smart tamperers who manage to show some purchases to stay out of the no/low consumption brackets and thus the municipal radar. Even when municipalities detect illegal connections through physical audits, the evidence is not presented well or in full before the court of law thus rendering the entire physical audit process useless — a double whammy for the municipality which has incurred the cost of the audit process and legal recourse but not realised any penalties from those erring customers.
In other words, if a back-end system could flag the dropping consumption trends across the customer base with clear segmentation and segregations, those insights could be used to target illegal connections and buck the widespread and increasing trend in tampering.