Big push to rural electrification on cards
Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI: Apart from giving a major thrust to power reforms and attracting large private investment, the new Government in office will give a big push to the rural electrification programme, curbing aggregate and technical losses (A&T) and working a roadmap for achieving the open access goal propagated by the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, in his last tenure.

The Prime Minister has, in the past, talked about giving focus to areas like reforms in the distribution sector. The new Power Minister will have his hands full with a number of issues like augmenting power supply, including a review of the present power generation situation of the nuclear plants. With the nuclear fuel supplies opening up from France and Russia, the focus would be on increasing the efficiency levels of the nuclear power plants from the present 41 per cent to much higher levels.

Dr. Singh had, in the past, time and again stressed on the need for a wide range of power sector reforms including open access and competition. The Prime Minister has suggested that inter-State transmission needs to be truly opened up to competition and a separate and independent government entity be set up to control the National Load Despatch Centre. In addition, he had underscored the importance of reducing transmission and distribution losses, launching a crash programme for capacity addition and taking steps to attract private investment.

However, this has not been fully backed by action by the Power Ministry or the Planning Commission and many of the issues have been hanging fire for long. “There was stagnancy in the power sector during the initial years of the UPA regime in the previous Government. But after the induction of Jairam Ramesh as the Minister of State for Power, things changed dramatically with a large number of stalled projects taking off and capacity addition targets being met due to constant monitoring,” a senior official said.

However, the rejuvenated UPA Government is likely to pursue power capacity addition and rural electrification in a big way. The Congress Party’s election manifesto had made it clear that highest priority would be accorded to rural electrification and reduction in power distribution losses.

At present, total power generation capacity in the country stands at around 1, 47,000 MW. The capacity addition of around 78,500 MW is envisaged in the XI Plan. The Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY), launched in April 2005, will be the flagship scheme during this tenure of the UPA regime.