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Journalism of Courage
The Planning Commission has pulled up the power ministry for the poor performance of its two major schemes: the Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Programme (APDRP) and the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY),for the absence of a monitoring mechanism.
In its recent presentation for the power sector,the Commission said that under the second phase of the APDRP which seeks to cover 1,400 big towns entailing an envisaged investment of Rs 21,820 crore,the programme has already sustained more than 15 per cent losses,or perhaps more. With no monitoring mechanism in place,there are no reliable figures of the money being disbursed routinely by the Centre and the credit agencies.
The pace of investments is inadequate as against Rs 50,000 core planned earlier, the Plan panel said. There are no details available on whether funds are being utilised for upgrading its information technology set up for executing the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) programme.
The Commission said that funds sanctioned under APDRP-II has been Rs 1,947.70 crore in 2008-09,Rs 6,242.28 crore in 2009-10 and Rs 13,630.68 crore in this fiscal.
The status of the RGGVY is also no better,the planning body said. Under the programme more than 16,000 villages have been reportedly electrified,but have still not been provided electricity. Through its Power for All initiative,the government has targeted 14,500 villages for electrification,covering 52,00,000 households below poverty line (BPL) in 2010-11,which has not been fulfilled.
The government is determined to provide electricity to 53,037 villages with 152.07 lakh BPL households. Large number of habitations still remain uncovered. There is a need to work out a concerted strategy to provide access to them, the Commission said.
The Plan panel is concerned that the pace of expansion in the power sector could be adversely impacted for reasons such as uncertainty on coal availability and absence of fuel linkage.
The paucity of coal has already impacted the growth of thermal power generation,that has been scaled down to 3.82 per cent from 5.56 per cent. It has asked the Central Electricity Authority to talk to the utilities for finalising plans for coal import through long-term fuel supply agreements. The Commission has projected coal imports to the tune of 50 million tonne this fiscal.
