UP gives final touches to ‘power for all’ plan

UP officials will give a detailed presentation on state’s preparedness to power secretary in New Delhi today

Uttar Pradesh is finally ready to roll out 24x7 power for all programme with the state’s energy department giving final touches to the plan in consultation with a Central government team here on Friday.

UP officials will on Saturday give a detailed presentation to the secretary (power) in New Delhi on the state’s preparedness for the roll out of the plan. This will be followed by signing of a ‘power for all’ agreement between the Centre and UP represented by union power minister Piyush Goyal and UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath here on April 14.

Significantly, UP is country’s only state that is yet to sign the power for all agreement with the Centre.

The plan aims at providing each household access to reliable and affordable 24X7 electricity supply by 2019. “But our efforts is to achieve the goal by October 2018 or even before and preparations are being made accordingly,” energy minister Srikant Sharma said.

A central government team headed by Rural Electrification Corporation (REC) executive director Ritu Maheshwari held a day-long meeting with senior officials from the UP Power Corporation Ltd, the UP Power Transmission Corporation, the UP Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd and all the four discoms to work out the details to prepare the power for all document.

“We are trying to figure out the expected demand and availability of power in 2019, consumer growth, required electricity network, staff etc needed to provide round the clock power to all by 2019,” UPPCL managing director Vishal Chauhan said.

The plan pertaining to reduction of aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses by curbing pilferages, increasing collection efficiency and effective metering to achieve the financial viability of the discoms was also discussed at the experts’ meeting held separately at the Shakti Bhawan in the evening.

Sources said providing electricity to all the households, reducing the AT&C losses and installing meters at all the premises are being seen as more serious challenge than meeting the demand-supply gap. In UP there are more than 60 lakh unmetered power connections, mostly in villages, and their number is only increasing.

Similarly, the AT&C losses in the state are above 30% which are more than double the norm. As per the 2011 Census, 1.8 crore households in UP still do not have access to electricity.

“Giving connections to all these consumers, besides doing 100% metering, bringing the losses down to the desirable extent by 2019 is really a daunting task,” said sources.