With excellent financial turnover, Andhra tops as best performer under UDAY scheme

Amravati, December 28: Andhra Pradesh tops amongst all the states of India under the Central government’s Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY) which means to improve the financials of state-run electricity distribution entities. Thanks to its robust power supply monitoring mechanism, the state discoms’ aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses are now lower than the FY18 target set under UDAY.

 

Ministry of Power, GoI launched Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana (UDAY) which was approved by Union Cabinet on 5th November, 2015.

The UDAY scheme envisages: Financial Turnaround, Operational improvement, Reduction of cost of generation of power, Development of Renewable Energy, Energy efficiency & conservation

The state’s AT&C loss currently stands at 7.9%, way lower than the average 23.9% for the major states under the UDAY scheme. Andhra Pradesh’s AT&C loss was 13.6% at the end of FY16. As per the UDAY memorandum of understanding, the state’s AT&C loss should be 8.9% by FY18-end.

Disciplined AT&C loss reduction is a critical feature in improving the financial conditions of the discoms. The outstanding debt level of Andhra Pradesh discoms reached Rs 15,690 crore at the end of FY16.

Even though the average 3.6% electricity tariff-hike in Andhra Pradesh for FY18 was less than the 5% proposed by UDAY, the gap between the cost of supply and revenue realised (ACS-ARR gap) for the state-discoms’ has narrowed to Rs 0.03/unit from Rs 0.80/unit at the time when it joined UDAY. The FY18 ACS-ARR gap for the state was `0.09/unit. The state expects the total revenue of its discoms would be Rs 24,064 crore.

The state had earned Rs 18,964 Crore from selling power in FY16. However, the state’s power utilities’ loss widened by more than 57% on an annual basis to Rs 3,606 crore.Contrary to the general trend, the state has already achieved the operational targets set for FY18 in infrastructural fronts such as feeder metering, feeder segregation and auditing rural meters.

Andhra Pradesh has also metered 5,097 urban distributed transformers and 69,775 rural distribution transformers, representing UDAY targets of 90% and 97% respectively.