Power miracle in Telangana

Hyderabad: The day the Telangana state was born, people were reeling under six hours of power cuts imposed in two spells in the capital, and much more in the semi-urban and rural areas.

Industry faced a one-day power holiday. The situation continued for a few months, during which time every political party predicted that the new state would have to suffer a power crunch for many years.

But, within months, power supply had been restored largely without interruptions. The peak summer season went off without outages to any sector, including the power-guzzling agriculture sector in a state which has the largest number of agricultural pump sets.

All this was achieved without a single MW of capacity addition by the state-owned plants. In the undivided state, the average supply used to be 123 million units a day, with the maximum recorded on March 23, 2014, at 144 MU in TS — but with long hours of power cuts.

After bifurcation, TS recorded an average supply of 130 MU (which was 7 MU more) and handled the maximum peak demand on March 28, 2015, of 154 MU (10 MU more) without power cuts.

Soon after bifurcation of power utilities, the TS Transco had swung into action and placed indents with all private power producers across the southern region to buy power.

“It was purely due to the efforts of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, who was the man behind our success story. The entire engineering staff came to the rescue with their improved efficiency,” said TS Genco, TS Transco chairman-cum-MD Devulapally Prabhakar Rao.