The move has got the green signal at the last KWA Board meeting.

“The consumers have to settle their arrears and then give their mandate allowing the bank to draw the bill amount from their account before the due date. In the mandate, they can put down the maximum amount that can be drawn from the account. Once the collection is made, the details will be made available in our network,” said a KWA official.

The project will become operational first in Thiruvananthapuram Public Health Division of the KWA shortly. As of now, Federal Bank and the State Bank of Travancore have come forward.

Any nationalised bank can join the fray.

“The Federal Bank officials have already held discussions with us. As of now, the bank won’t levy extra charge on the KWA or the account holder,” a KWA official said.

This is a component of the enhanced ABACUS (Advanced Billing, Accounting and Collection Utility System). ABACUS recently won an award instituted by the Union Urban Ministry.

The arrangement will be extended to other parts of the State as part of the State-wide roll out of the hardware and software infras t ructure o f the KWA.

The KWA Board has already given the go ahead for the roll out which is expected to happen within a year thus making the KWA the first public utility service to go fully online.

The important software expansion will be of ABACUS. Now the consumers of Thiruvananthapuram division can pay water charges in any collection centres under the division. When fully implemented across the State, consumers can pay water charges at any collection centre.

Ten new modules are being added to the existing ABACUS.

This enhanced ABACUS will be rolled out to the 192 centres in the State (excluding the centres in Thiruvanan-thapuram), thus covering over 12 lakh consumers.

The Complaint Redressal System, which is already in place in the Thiruvananthapuram division will be extended to 33 more KWA Revenue Divisions.

It is learnt that the post offices have also evinced interest in being collection centres of water bills, especially since networking is happening in the sector. However, this might take sometime.