Rich Returns From Poor Women Collecting Debts

An indian power company recruits slum dwellers to collect payments for electricity from their neighbours

- Bhuma Shrivastava & Rajesh Kumar Singh

India’s power companies have long struggled with a problem that’s largely responsible for $10 billion a year in losses: slum dwellers who steal electricity and then refuse to pay company officials who come seeking remuneration. Collectors can’t go into some neighbourhoods without being chased by mobs. Some have been beaten, tied up, urinated on, even murdered.

Officials at Tata Power Co.’s joint venture with the Delhi state government have come up with a solution. They’re hiring women living in the 223 slums the venture serves in the northern parts of the Indian capital to press their peers to pay up.

Called Abhas, from the Sanskrit word for light, the 841 women—wives, mothers, and some as young as 20 years old—go around the slums knocking on neighbours’ doors and persuading, coaxing, cajoling, and nagging them to pay their power bills.

They’ve been so successful that the joint venture, Tata Power Delhi Distribution Ltd., has seen a 183 per cent increase in revenue over five years from the slums where the project runs, with minimal cost to the company. The number of active power connections has risen 40 per cent, to 196,000—meaning that 56,000 previously freeloading homes have become active, bill-paying customers.

“This gave us a way to get into these neighbourhoods, rife with mafia and political influences,” says Praveer Sinha, managing director at Tata Power-DDL, which began operating literacy campaigns for slum women in 2010 as a way into the communities. “We thought educated women would give us a much better buy-in.”