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Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 26: Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee today said power capacity addition in the country would be way below the Ninth Plan target and apprehended that only one third of Rs 11,00,000 crore needed would be met by the year 2012.
Outlining a seven-point agenda to overcome problems plaguing the power sector, Vajpayee told the State Power Ministers’ Conference "the poor financial health of our state electricity boards (SEBs) and as yet inadequate private sector investment in the power sector are largely responsible for this inability to meet targets."
"We still have to add more than one lakh mega watt during the tenth and eleventh plans. To achieve this target, we will need around Rs 11,00,000 crore, but the resources likely to be available will be only about a third of this amount," Vajpayee said.
He prescribed a joint resource mobilisation effort by Centre and states, renovation and modernisation, strengthening of transmission and distribution system and metering of all power consumption by December next year.
As part of his seven-point agenda, Vajpayee suggested unbundling of generation, transmission and distribution of power utilities through corporatisation to improve their financial health and privatisation of distribution to improve recovery and check pilferage.
He stressed increasing the hydel generation capacity and changing the hydel-thermal ratio for operating at a higher level of efficiency and asked the ministers to deliberate on inter-regional transfer of power to overcome deficit in certain regions.
He said subsidies were not a solution to power problem as these did not work beyond a point and added that these on the contrary affected performance of the power sector, resulting in unreliable and poor electricity supply. "I have no doubt that the consumer today would much rather pay for reliable and quality power," Vajpayee said.
He emphasised on moving away from the mind set of the past and giving up the idea of monolithic SEBs to reform and restructure this highly capital-intensive sector.
In this context, he said both Centre as well as states would have to pursue active private participation in all spheres of power sector and expressed his happiness over restructuring of SEBs in Orissa, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh.
Among others, CMs of Madhya Pradesh Digvijay Singh, Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, CMDs of Central Power PSUs and officials of Finance, Railway and Power ministries attended the conference.
