Tata Power plans to invest Rs 850-crore till FY12 to beef up generation, transmission and distribution, a senior company official told PTI.
The company will be investing Rs 850-crore over 3-years (FY10 till FY12) to enhance its generation, transmission and distribution capabilities, said Tata Power's Executive Director-Operations, S Padmanabhan.
According to Padmanabhan, the company is also "eyeing a customer-base of close 1,40,000 by March 2011" from the existing clientele of 85,000. He claims more than 50,000 customers have shifted to Tata Power from its competitor--RInfra--in recent months.
Besides, to improve the power supply, the company has earmarked Rs 300-crore each for transmission and distribution while Rs 250-crore will be invested in upping generation capacity, he said.
Tata Power is witnessing a significant market response and this is evident from the nearly 1,200-calls per day received by the company's officials (seeking its power) over the last two weekends, Padmanabhan said.
"We will be laying a new network for all our new customers. In the current fiscal, we will be laying around 110 circuit kilometres of network," the Tata Power official said.
The cost of laying one-kilometre of such a network works out to around Rs 1 crore, he said.
The company has also set up 17 consumer sub-stations in the last six-months to support its expansion.
Besides, to facilitate customers' change-over from RInfra to Tata Power, it has set up two call-centres capable of handling 1,000 calls per day, five customer-care centres, 40 drop-boxes and kiosks.
"We have 40 officials who go to small colonies, including slums, to collect payments and also vans to go to different places to fill-up forms. Our aim is to create infrastructure, which will make it easy for people to become Tata Power customers," Padmanabhan said.
