New Delhi: The government has dropped the plan to break the monopoly of discoms by bringing in competition and has rather decided to focus on introducing a direct benefit transfer scheme (DBT) as the next wave of reforms in the power sector.
Minister of state for power R K Singh told IANS that the plan for separation of carriage and content operations in the distribution segment that would have allowed multiple discoms in one area has been dropped for now and may be covered as part of the next leg of reforms sometime in the future.
“The plan for ushering in competition in the distribution segment has not been covered now. It may happen sometime down the road not now, maybe in the next leg of reforms,” Singh said indicating that the states are still not ready for it and have cited infrastructure shortcomings for not supporting this reform agenda.
The Electricity Act, 2003, laid the foundation for introducing competition at the consumer end of electricity supply through open access and provision for parallel distribution licensees. However both these concepts saw limited success in the Indian electricity sector. The process was fine tuned in the Electricity Amendment Bill by proposing separation of carriage and content operations in power distribution and allowing multiple players in a distribution area.
