New Delhi (Sputnik) — A missing decimal point in the computation of the electricity consumption by a household in India has led the head of the family to end his life. 36-years-old Jagannath Nehaji Shelke was found hanging from the ceiling at his home in Maharastra with a suicide note claiming he was unable to bear the burden of the INR 8.64 lac (approximately $12,874) bill slapped on him by the state electricity department for consuming 61178 units of electricity during the month of April, while it was later found that his family had in reality only consumed 6117.8 units.
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After the suicide caught media attention, the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company later admitted the erroneous bill was generated due to a missing decimal point of the consuming unit.
In a suicide note found at the site, Jagannath had written that his family could not have consumed so much electricity as they paid only INR 1,000 on average per month.
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Bloated electricity bills due to the faulty counting of units have been a major problem in India, mainly due to the manual data collection system. Last August, B. R. Guha, a resident of the eastern state of Jharkhand, received an electricity bill amounting to approximately $572 million, which was later found defective. In 2015, Krishna Prasad was hospitalized after he suffered a stroke when the state electricity department served him an electricity bill amounting to approximately $5 million. During the same year, Rohit Saxena, a Ghaziabad resident, received a bill of approximately $33 million, which was later proved faulty after a month of struggle with the power department.