Bangladesh Rural Electrification Board will purchase over half a million pre-paid meters under the scheme to provide power connections to 1.8m new rural households, officials said.
The power division proposal to procure the pre-paid meters is set to be placed today at the meeting of Cabinet Committee on Public Purchase for its approval.
According to the power division proposal, M/S Techno Electrics Ltd will procure 525,470 pre-meters at a cost of Tk57.78 crore in five lots.
The cost of a pre-paid meter will be around Tk5,000 which can be paid in monthly instalments.
An REB official said the local farm M/S Techno Electrics Ltd was the lowest bidder in an open tender recently which saw participation of two other farms - M/S Magnitude International Ltd and M/S Pasha Electro Industries Ltd.
State Minister for Power and Energy Nasrul Hamid already announced that the country’s entire power distribution system would be brought under prepaid metering system by 2021.
The pre-paid meters are believed to be able to check corruption and reduce system loss in the country’s power sector.
“Prepaid meters will help increase the revenue of the government as well,” Nasrul Hamid said adding that “this is a turning point to improve the power consumers’ services.”
He said the country has been “able to come out of the curse of power outage. Now we concentrate on improving the customer service.”
The junior minister said the government has planned to generate 24,000MW of electricity by 2024 of which a big portion will come from coal-fired power plants. “So, our major challenge will be to set up coal-fired power plants in future.”
