Andhra Pradesh ranks at the top in rural electrification among all the states while its performance in other power sector reforms is also ahead of many states, said Minister of State for Power KC Venugopal.
He was here on Wednesday to review the status of Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyudikaran Yojana (RGGVY) and the Restructured Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Programme (RAPDRP), the two flagship programmes of the Union power ministry.
The lone issue where improvement is needed is the consumer survey of 5.2 million customers in 113 towns with population exceeding 30,000, where RAPDRP is being undertaken, according to Ajay Jain, chairman and managing director of APTransco.
The reform programme includes improving consumer services through setting up of local-area networks, call centres, and other IT infrastructure like data and disaster recovery centres. TCS, which won the Rs 232-crore contract for the project, is expected to complete it by February 2012.
Under this, four pilots at Tirupati, Visakhapatnam, Hyderabad and Warangal would be finished by August, while the rest would be completed by December . These would be tested in February 2012.
The programme also involves network augmentation, underground cabling, setting up distribution transformers in 42 towns (including Hyderabad) where the distribution loss levels exceed 15 per cent. The contracts for the Rs 1,056-crore, two-year programme is to be awarded by June-end.
Under RGGVY, the state received Rs 824.90 crore, of which 90 per cent was grant and 10 per cent loan from the Rural Electrification Corporation. It covered 13,356 habitations involving 3.15 million households since its launch in 2005.
The ministry’s SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) programme, which funds technological upgradation to remotely monitor and operate power sub-stations, would cover six towns in the state with energy consumption of 350 million units a year.
Of these Hyderabad, Warangal, Tirupati, Vijayawada and Guntur have been sanctioned, while for Vizag(where loss level is less than 5 per cent) a special proposal has been made, Jain said.
