Hyderabad: Nearly 18 months after the power ministry announced the vital Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana scheme for financial and operational reforms of the power distribution companies in India, progress on the operational parameters has been much slower than expected.
The Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) losses have come down from 24 per cent in financial year 2016 to 22.5 per cent, the target is to reach 15 per cent by 2019.
Tariff under recovery, which is expected to be eliminated completely by 2019, has reduced only marginally, according to the latest report of Union energy ministry.
Except Odisha, 26 states and Union Territories, including Andhra Pradesh and Telangana state have joined the UDAY scheme.
The scheme has been successful in achieving its most important objective of restoring financial health of Discoms. The Telangana state government has waived about Rs 8,923 crore of a total of 11,897 crore outstanding debts of Discoms.
The report said, “As expected, progress on operational parameters such as aggregate technical and commercial losses and tariff hikes remains comparatively weak”.
However, the Telangana state government did not hike the power tariff for any category for 2017-18 whereas the Andhra Pradesh government has affected a 4 per cent hike.
Regarding transmission sector, Telangana state has amongst the high performing utilities in the country with the transmission losses were 3.59 per cent and transmission system availability as high as 99.94 per cent.
In Telangana state, transmission losses have seen an impressive downward trend, from 4.5 per cent in 2010 -11 to 3.59 per cent at present.
