India is planning another wave of reforms aimed at turning around its struggling power retailers.
The initiative is still under consideration, an Indian Ministry of Power spokeswoman said yesterday, declining to provide details.
The reforms could cost as much as 2.5 trillion rupees (US$35.1 billion) over five years, people with knowledge of the issue said.
The measures would focus on infrastructure and technology upgrades of the ailing utilities to make them more efficient and reduce financial losses, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is not public.
The efforts could include central government grants of as much as 1 trillion rupees to states that meet targets set by New Delhi, they said.
IMPROVING EFFICIENCY
The plan could include the installation of about 250 million prepaid smart meters, which are expected to boost revenue collection.
Other measures include systems to better monitor and control networks — known as supervisory control and data acquisition systems — separating grids for farmers and residential users, and replacing overhead cables with special insulated wires to prevent theft.
Electricity distributors are the weakest link in the country’s power supply chain, losing almost one-fifth of their revenue because of technical and commercial reasons, including loss of power supplies through theft and poor transmission infrastructure or inefficient billing and collection.
Reviving these utilities would be critical to ensuring reliable power supplies and improving the financial health of electricity generators.
The investment in smart meters is expected to become part of the operating expenses of retailers and would be funded using the efficiency gains they derive from the upgrade, the people said.
The ministry is working with distribution companies on models for other initiatives, they said, with any payments from the federal government linked to meeting targets.
FAILED INITIATIVE
The new measures would follow an unsuccessful plan unveiled in 2015 to make retailers profitable by March last year. That effort included reducing revenue lost from theft and poor billing to an average of 15 percent.
While such losses did decline, they were still at about 18 percent at the end of the year to March, the ministry said in a report in October.
Combined net income losses at distributors that signed up for the reform plan in the same year widened to about 280.4 billion rupees, an 85 percent year-on-year increase, the report said.
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