PM, FM discuss power woes with Piyush Goyal

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday met power and coal minister Piyush Goyal to discuss bottlenecks in the power sector and also deliberated on the fallout of the apex court’s view on coal block allocation.

Goyal met the Prime Minister along with finance minister Arun Jaitley and discussed various issues including resolving the conflicts between the power sector borrowers and banks. Goyal is said to have provided an account of his work in the past three months. The meeting is significant, coming just days ahead of September 1, when NDA completes 100 days in power.

Bankers have time and again raised the issue of delayed regulatory clearances that have led to banks and other financial institutions shying away from investing in the power sector.

“The Prime Minister desires that all issues, which are urgent

THE PRIME MINISTER DESIRES THAT ALL ISSUES, WHICH ARE URGENT AND NEED TO BE PRIORITISED, SHOULD BE QUICKLY RESOLVEDT

PIYUSH GOYAL, ahead of the meeting

and need to be prioritised should be quickly resolved,” the power minister said before the meeting.

“As the PM has said in the past that this government works as an organic entity, it interacts with various ministries to learn and understand the priority issues and ways to resolve them on a real-time basis,” he added.

Daily power outages have become a cause of concern for the government and been discussed widely in internal meetings of the power ministry. The country faced the worst blackout that left nearly 620 million people without electricity in 2012.