‘Unhappy situation’ of large electricity shortfalls in the past reversed, says Power Ministry
India’s power deficit this year ‘spiked marginally’ to 1.2% due to the ‘annual post-monsoon pressure’ on output, the government said in a statement on Monday, asserting that the deficit has been ‘near about wiped out’ in recent years.
“The current year, up till October, it (the power deficit) has been -1.2%; the marginal spike being attributable to the annual post-monsoon pressure on power output. This is also likely to normalise by the end of the year,” the Power Ministry said in a statement, contrasting the figure with deficit levels of upto 16% some years ago.
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“India had a massive power deficit of -16.6% in 2007-08. Even in 2011-12, it was -10.6%. Through the multi-pronged, comprehensive and aggressive interventions of the government, this deficit is near about wiped out, consistently over the last three years: -.4% in 2020-21, -.7% in 2019-20 and -.8% in 2018-19,” the Ministry said.
The Ministry attributed ‘this transformation from an acutely power deficit country, to a situation of demand being met, except for an extremely marginal shortfall of less than 1%’ to several schemes introduced by the government over the past six years in the power sector, ‘to address the unhappy situation’.
“The augmentation to the installed power capacity in the country, consequent to these efforts, has been 1,55,377 megawatt in last approximately seven years,” it concluded, citing schemes such as the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana for setting up of transmission and sub-transmission systems in rural India and the Integrated Power Development Scheme (IPDS) to plug power infrastructure gaps in urban areas.
“The Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana (Saubhagya) scheme launched on September 25, 2017, had the vision to take electricity to every household (willing), and has been able to supply electricity connections to 2.8 to crore households which were hitherto in darkness,” the statement noted.
