The government is to table a Bill in the coming session of Parliament to reconstitute the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), in line with recommendations from the Administrative Staff College of India, the Union Cabinet decided today.
The present DVC Act came into being in 1948, the first multipurpose river valley project of independent India. Modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the US, the 24,000 sq km covered by DVC activities are partly in Jharkhand and partly in West Bengal.
The Union ministry of power had asked ASCI to examine various alternative models for restructuring the DVC in line with today’s needs and suggest the most viable one. The aim was to make the functioning more professional.
The Bill would amend the present DVC Act to have a board with four full-time members (chairman, member (technical), member (finance) and member-secretary, with the chairman also the CEO) and six part-time members. Namely, a representative each from the central government and the two state governments and three independent experts, one each from the fields of irrigation, water supply and generation or transmission of electricity.
HIGHER STRATEGIC CRUDE OIL STORAGE
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs today approved enhancement of capacity, type of utilisation and revised cost estimates of the strategic crude oil storage cavern at Visakhapatnam.
The CCEA approved capacity expansion from a million tonnes to 1.33 mt. The 0.30 mt additional capacity’s cost would be shared by Hindustan Petroleum Corporation. The CCEA also okayed a revision of cost estimates from Rs 671.8 crore for a million tonnes to Rs 1,038 crore for 1.33 mt.