Lucknow, 21 October: Now before installing smart prepaid electricity meters, companies will have to obtain the certificate of Mandatory Testing and Certification of Telecom Equipment.
For this, the Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Telecommunications of the Government of India has issued orders.
This order will come into effect from January 1, 2024. The Government of India wants to know whether the radio emission waves emanating from smart prepaid meters are having a negative impact on the general public. For this, it has now been made mandatory for smart prepaid meter companies to follow the standard.
The State Electricity Consumer Council has expressed gratitude on this order of the Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Communications.
The Consumer Council had been demanding this for a long time, because the manufacturers of smart meters are Chinese. Due to this, there is a possibility of them supplying poor quality meters.
Consumer Council said that in the past, lakhs of smart meters in Uttar Pradesh were automatically switched off on the day of Janmashtami, which proves that they are of poor quality, which is troubling the consumers even today. Was. Mobile switched off, not smart meter. This means the waves of the smart meter are more powerful.
12 lakh smart meters have been installed in Uttar Pradesh and orders have been issued to install 3 crore smart prepaid meters. It will start taking effect after one or two months. As everyone knows that smart prepaid meter requires any mobile SIM for communication.
The modem connects and then starts working automatically. This proved that all those measures related to telecom related networking are necessary, which are provided by the Government of India.
This discussion was going on at a high level for a long time, due to which the Consumer Council was also continuously raising the demand that after the installation of smart meter, the radio frequency emissions i.e. waves emanating from it are not having any adverse effect on the general public. Security system is fine. The networking system is under the guidelines of the Government of India.
As to who will test all these, Neeraj Mittal, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications, Government of India, has written a letter to Pankaj Aggarwal, Union Energy Secretary, Government of India, saying that the smart electricity meter, the modem installed in it, the IoT gateway tracking device, the router, line switch, fiber It will be mandatory for all telecom products related to telecom networking including cable to undergo mandatory testing and certification of telecom equipment from January 1, 2024.
Awadhesh Kumar Verma, Chairman of Uttar Pradesh State Electricity Consumer Council and member of the State Advisory Committee, said that the Consumer Council was doing a deep study on this for a long time and was raising demands.
Verma added, this should be implemented in all circumstances, because smart meter companies are manufacturing poor quality meters on a large scale and in order to earn commission, they install Chinese modem device chip and give it to the middlemen, that is, the middlemen who take the tender for smart meters, at a cheap rate to the industrialists.
