UDAY : Rural Power Supply Status

Electrification Status:

The Centre has claimed 100% electrification of all villages and 83% of all households across the country.
It has said that all households will be electrified by the year-end.

Power Supply responsibility:

While it is the Centre’s responsibility to connect households and villages to the power grid or provide them alternative sources of electricity, it cannot guarantee the supply of electricity to them.
The actual supply is the responsibility of the power distribution companies in each State.

Issues that remain:

However, there are several discrepancies between the actual and the on-paper status of electrification.
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 but connected on paper.
In other cases, electricity was supplied for just a few hours a day.
Despite the government pegging India as a power surplus nation, almost every State in the country reels under power cuts, especially during peak summer.
This, according to power sector analysts, is because discoms are still very inefficient, with the costs they incur in the transmission far outweighing revenue.
Government data show discoms across the country, on an average, lose Rs.0.22 a unit of electricity supplied.
However, the Power Ministry has claimed that this situation is improving rapidly under the Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY), with Power Minister recently saying that discom losses have drastically reduced to Rs.17,352 crore in 2017-18 from Rs.51,096 crore in the previous year.
On their own, many of the discoms right now are not ready to provide 24×7 power, for two reasons: the first is their financial health. Most of them are not financially capable to do this.
Secondly, only some of the discoms have the infrastructure to supply good quality power on a sustained basis.

More to achieve

Sector specialists, however, say that while the performance of discoms is improving, they are still not at the performance level to supply electricity 24×7.
The only hope of the utilities is continued assistance from the State governments.
If the respective State governments continue to give financial support and assurances to the discoms, then the condition could definitely improve.

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