Where are the discoms in terms of achieving the target given by Prime Minister to reduce AT&C losses to 15 per cent? Which states have done better and which not and  your take on their performance?

The status of aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) loss during 2003-04 and 2008-09 in the state discoms as available with Forum of Regulators (FOR) secretariat is enclosed at Annexure I. As per the data available, it has been observed that the private utilities in Ahmedabad, Surat, Mumbai (and also the local body BEST), Greater Noida in UP, DSPL in West Bengal have been able to keep AT&C losses lower than 15 per cent and in some cases  also further improve upon. The private utility CESC in West Bengal , SPDCL, the government owned discom in AP, MGVCL and UGVCL in Gujarat have been able to bring down losses below 15 per cent.  Though their loss levels are still higher than 15 per cent, the discoms of West Bengal, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan (AVVNL and JdVVNL), Uttar Pradesh (DVVN), Uttarakhand, Karnataka (CESC), Gujarat (PGVCL) have achieved a reduction of more than 15 per cent of AT&C loss during last 4-5 years. Reduction in AT&C losses requires investments for reducing technical losses and more importantly better governance for controlling theft and effective energy audit. 

How effective the schemes like APDRP, R-APDRP and RGVVY in reducing the AT&C losses?

The APDRP scheme was launched by ministry of  power in the year 2000-01. The programme had investment component only. However, on recommendation of “Deepak Parikh Committee on state specific reforms”, incentive component was also included with an emphasis and the programme was rechristened as APDRP in 2002-03. The ministry constituted a task force to assess and analyze the efforts, suggestions made by various agencies and to suggest restructuring of the programme to achieve the objectives of APDRP.
The major observation of the task force are as follows:

• Many of the states were yet to adopt reform path and that the performance of the utilities was much better in states where there was commitment for reforms in comparison to other states. At SEB level, it was a mixed achievement on the proposed interventions. Some of the utilities adopted feeder manager approach to make the field level officer accountable and through monitoring of their performance, achieved very good results in form of improvement in all the KPIs. The monitoring of achievements has improved to great extent in many utilities. However, much was still desirable in some of the utilities.
•  Trend in increase in commercial losses of the utilities has not only been arrested but now it was on a downward trend at the national level. The reduction in theft and pilferage was an important activity had to undertake towards reducing AT&C loss and achieving the commercial viability.  Also some of the states were not able to deal effectively with power theft cases.
• At the town level, though reduction in AT&C losses and DT failure rate has been reported in most of the towns, where APDRP work has been considerably completed, it was however observed that significant reduction was only in few states.
• Though about 96 per cent of the feeders have been metered at national level, however, energy auditing was at initial level. It was observed that such of the feeders, where augmentation has been done and the energy accounting has started, outages have reduced and significant improvement has been achieved in respect of AT&C losses and DT failure rate.
• It was noted that the metering of agricultural consumers has not been taken up by most of the states.  Task Force was of the view that it will not be possible to reduce the technical as well as commercial losses without metering each and every consumer, smaller or bigger, including agriculture.
•  AT&C losses of 5.06 per cent was reduced during three years, i.e. 1.68 per cent reduction per year as against a target of 9 per cnet per year. The achievement can not be considered as small as the actual implementation of the programme started quite late, though it could have been better. Improvement in billing and collection efficiency has taken place in most of the utilities. The trend of sell more lose more has reversed, which should be appreciated. While analyzing the collection efficiency of the utilities, payments of the electricity dues by government departments/local bodies impacted the revenue collection by the utilities.
• Majority of the APDRP projects were sanctioned during 2002 and 2003. However, only few states took prompt action towards quick implementation of these projects. It was observed that there has been delay in implementation of the APDRP projects. Though, there could be many reasons for delay, however most of these delays could have been avoided, if projects were prepared based on good planning through new technologies. Hence, there was a need of better planning, data management, project management and monitoring.
• Some utilities diverted funds under this scheme for their normal O&M work and it has felt that this should not be allowed. The utilities, which executed CAT-A schemes, derived better results, though, CAT-B schemes were also necessary.
•  Incentive was a big motivating factor for the utilities for reducing their losses through efficiency improvements. It noted that some of the states, which took the incentives earlier, could not take up the incentive again. This would indicate that the utilities are not consistent in their performance which needs to be analyzed and corrective measures taken.Though many of the Utilities have reduced their commercial losses but only few of them achieved reduction in cash losses. The main reasons for not achieving the cash losses reduction were for supplying free power for agriculture sector, inadequate subsidy in form of tariff compensation and increase in receivables.
• APDRP was still at initial stage and the full benefits of the programme can not be expected at this stage and that the assessment of benefits from the programme should be made after covering all the district headquarter towns at least and when sufficient work has been completed

Further RAPDRP programme was started in September 2008. Therefore, the results of this scheme is yet to come and RGGY scheme has no direct correlation with the AT&C loss reduction.

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