Indian villages to be lit up on Chinese model

The Indian government is chalking out plans to introduce a Chinese model of power distribution to light up the country's 'powerless' villages.

Official estimates say 5,19,570 villages and 56.48 percent of the households across India do not have electricity.

Several energy experts have argued that generation of power through new and renewable sources of energy, distributed and managed on community basis (taking off grid transmission course) can be a better alternative for faster rural electrification.

According to a study by the ministry for renewable energy sources, India could generate about 84,776 mwe grid-interactive power from non-conventional sources, like agro residues, wind power, small hydro projects, cogeneration from bagasse and from industrial wastes.

Officials said the government is planning to introduce a new technology based on wood-fuel to power the acute power shortage in India's villages.

It will be modeled on China's off grid approach to power distribution, which lifted up its rural villages.

To start with, the National Thermal Power Corporation will set up 60 such units of 20 kilovolts (KV) to 100KV each, at a total investment of Rs 21 crore (Rs 210 million).

If these projects are successful, the number of villages may be increased to 500 in the following year and then replicated across the country, power ministry official said.

The government is already willing to fund around 1,000 such projects, which will take the total investment to Rs 350 crore (Rs 3.5 billion).

According to Santosh Mehrotra, senior consultant to Planning Commission, around 94 per cent of China's households had electricity in 1994.

"Part

of this success must be attributed to its distributed approach to power generation. India should go the similar way," he added.

The government wants to provide power to all by 2012, but although power distribution companies have spent around Rs 88,000 crore (Rs 880 billion) in the last decade, only 43.5 per cent of rural households currently get electricity.

Experts say for complete electrification, the government must now not only take a part of the grid to a village, but also provide power connections to the gram panchayats, schools and primary health centres as well as ensure electricity in at least 10 per cent of the village houses.

The government plans to set up 5,000 megawatts of capacity through distributed generation during the current plan period, which runs through 2012.

NTPC has been chosen as the executing agency for this project due to its pan-Indian presence.

"We will prepare detailed project reports for the remaining projects in the current financial year and will be using fallen forest wood as fuel," said a senior NTPC executive associated with the scheme.