Smartcard holders among prepaid consumers still having trouble recharging

The smartcard-holding prepaid consumers are still having trouble making payments to buy electricity due to lack of mobile internet service.

According to officials of the Dhaka Electric Supply Company (Desco) and Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC), many smartcard holders are failing to recharge the balance on their cards to purchase electricity.

“The smart card users have to use their mobile SIMs to recharge cards from their own locations, without coming to power offices. But since there no internet in the mobile phones, these smartcard users could not recharge their cards,” said a top official of Desco.

This was echoed by DPDC officials as well. A DPDC official at Tegjaon area said there are two types pre-paid cards—normal prepaid and smart prepaid.

He noted that those who use prepaid cards can easily recharge their cards from the local DPDC office to recharge balances.

But those who use the smart cards are facing troubles as they would not be able to recharge their cards until internet is available in their mobiles, he noted.

Though they could connect with broadband on their phones to access the app used for recharging, the availability of broadband is anyway limited. The vast majority of internet users in Bangladesh use their mobile operator’s service.         

The DPDC official did however say that smartcard holders are limited in numbers. “Most of our consumers are normal prepaid card holders,” he added.

A Desco official in Mirpur-Kafrul area informed that in his area, there are about 20,000 smart pre-paid card holders out of a total 63,000 consumers.

The smartcard holders are facing problems in recharging their cards, but normal prepaid card holders are not experiencing such difficulties, he said.      

The pre-paid electricity and gas consumers have been facing troubles following the shutdown of internet services as many of them failed to recharge their cards from vendors.

According to consumers of different areas, electricity and gas supply was stopped automatically when their cards’ limit was exhausted.

It was seen in many areas in the city that the pre-paid card users had to wait in long queues for several hours to recharge their cards from their respective power offices as card recharge vendors could not provide them the recharge service.

Sources in the Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC) and Dhaka Electric Supply Company (Desco), there are over 9 lakh electricity consumers who use the pre-paid cards.

Against this back drop, State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid directed the power and energy sector utilities to provide emergency balances to their pre-paid consumers.

“We’ve directed the officials of power and gas offices to provide emergency balances to those consumers who come to recharge their pre-paid cards,” he told reporters while visiting Tejgaon local office of Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC) on Monday.

He informed that each single-phase consumer of electricity will get Tk 3000 of emergency balance while the three-phase consumer will get Tk 5000 emergency balance.