OREANDA-NEWS. The last two years have seen rapid progress towards Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s vision of 24x7 affordable environment friendly ‘Power for All’ by 2022 – a mission we are working to achieve by 2019.

Scarcity to Surplus

In a significant transformation, India has become power surplus from chronic power shortage. Record capacity addition of around one-fifth of current conventional power capacity and solar power capacity addition of 157% in the last two years led to a boost in power generation. The highest-ever increase in transmission lines and sub-stations improved the transmission scenario resulting in energy deficit falling to lowest ever of 2.1% in 2015-16.

Critical Coal Situation Resolved

Today, not a single power plant faces shortage of coal as opposed to the impending power crisis in 2014 when two-thirds of major power plants had critical coal stocks of less than 7 days. Working on war footing our government completely eliminated coal shortage in the country. In line with achieving the target of doubling coal production to 100 crore tonnes by 2020, the last two years witnessed the highest ever growth in coal production of 7.4 crore tonnes.

Most comprehensive power sector reform ever

Our government focused on addressing the root problems of the power sector. UDAY (Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana) for improvement in financial and operational efficiencies of State Power Distribution Companies (DISCOMs), the weakest link in the power value chain, was launched in 2015. Every DISCOM is expected to eliminate losses by 2019-20 with potential savings of over Rs. 180,000 crore every year from 2019. UDAY was designed through extensive stakeholder consultations and has been a game changer for States. Despite being a voluntary scheme 18 States and 1 Union Territory across political and regional lines have signed agreements or agreed to join. UDAY bonds worth about Rs. 1 lakh crore were issued within three weeks.

Progress of Programmes

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day, 2015 promise of connecting the unconnected 18,452 un-electrified villages in 1,000 days is ahead of schedule with over 40% (7,779 remote villages) already electrified. India is headed for the top slot in the global LED market through UJALA (Unnat Jyoti by Affordable LEDs for All) Yojana, which will replace 77 crore bulbs with energy efficient LED bulbs by 2019. Over 9 crore LED bulbs were distributed in 2015-16, about 150 times higher than 6 lakh in 2013-14.