BSNL plans to allow bill payment at PCOs

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BSNL is moving to make telephone bill payment hassle-free for its customers by authorising its public call booth operators (STD/PCOs) to collect bills.

The Marketing Cell of the BSNL Corporate Office, New Delhi in an order dated April 13 has directed the Chief General Managers of all telecom circles and Chennai and Kolkata telecom districts to authorise the STD/PCOs that have generated Rs 5,000 or more revenue on an average in the last six months to collect telephone bills.

The booth operators would be permitted to collect the payment only through cheque or demand draft.

According to the BSNL Chief General Manager, Tamil Nadu Circle, K. Sridhara, the operators will have to install a computer on their own at their centres.

BSNL would provide them the bill payment software for issuing computer-generated receipts to customer with all details reflecting on the receipts as well as in the system.

They would be required to remit the cheque/demand draft with details of payment to the concerned accounts officer on a daily basis in soft copy.

After verifying the details, the accounts officer would update them in the BSNL system.

Until the software is provided by the BSNL, the operator would be allowed to update the details of payment in Excel sheet and submit it to the bill collection centre for updating on a daily basis, with all relevant fields like telephone number, consumer number, amount paid, cheque number, and date of deposit of bill.

The operator would get Rs 5 for each bill, he added.

There are 9.5 lakh BSNL STD/PCO operators in the country, 65,000 of them in Tamil Nadu. BSNL has 29 lakh landline subscribers and nine lakh mobile phone subscribers, Sridhara said.