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Centre cannot guarantee power supply to all villages, says official
News:
- Despite the government pegging India as a power surplus nation, almost every State in the country reels under power cuts.
Important facts:
- Centre’s responsibility is to connect households and villages to the power grid , it cannot guarantee the supply of electricity to them.
- It is the responsibility of State level distribution companies to ensure power availability in every villages
- The government is working on 24X7 power for all deadline by March 2019.
5. The Centre has claimed 100% electrification of all villages and 83% of all households across the country.
6. However, there are several discrepancies between the actual and the on-paper status of electrification. For example:
- In some cases, the electrification infrastructure such as cables and transformers were stolen days after they were installed, leaving the target village unelectrified in reality
- In other cases, electricity was supplied for just a few hours a day.
7. Reasons :
- Inefficiency of discom, with the costs they incur in the transmission far outweighing revenue.
- Government data show discoms across the country, on an average, lose ₹0.22 a unit of electricity supplied.
- However , the Power ministry claims that situation is improving under the Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY). And discom losses reduced drastically compared to previous year.
- Financial health of discoms are not viable.
- Some of them have good infrastructure facilities to supply good quality power on a sustained basis.
8. Suggestions:
- Respective State governments continue to give financial support and assurances to the discoms.
