Electric power: a government priority

Keenly aware of the serious obstruction to future development, the Government of India has made generating capacity and transmission system additions a priority in its five year economic plans. The current plan, for the period 1992-97, originally envisioned an addition of 38,000 MW, or about 50 percent of India´s installed capacity. This would raise peak power availability to just over 65,000 MW to meet anticipated peak demand of nearly 70,000 MW. Expected energy availability would be 472.7 terawatthours, for a requirement of 395.3 TWh. The plan also called for transmission-circuit additions of 4000 km of 400 kV line, 1200 km of 800 kV line, and 1500 km of high-voltage DC (HVDC) line. Regrettably, all of these figures have proved too ambitious in light of significant financial constraints. Consequently, in 1997, at the end of the planning period, the country would fall short by about 15 percent in meeting both energy and peak-demand requirements.<>