It was on August 15, 2015 that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his government would electrify 18,452 un-electrified villages in the coming 1,000 days. The ministry of power headed by Piyush Goyal has been declaring targets achieved in this direction every week, with latest number of electrified villages being 7,991.
The data, however, has been contested as power supply being a state subject continues to elude these villages, as per independent reports. The blame game continues as the states’ data on electrified villages and Centre’s announcement, don’t match. Some states do not have any database on un-electrified and semi-electrified villages, making monitoring difficult. To put to rest this discrepancy, the ministry of power would now install modems and SCADA systems on every rural power supply feeder to track power supply.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (SCADA) is an industrial control system, which monitors and controls processes such as industrial production and power demand-supply, etc., mostly through remote technology. The monitored data would be available on a cloud-based national portal and would show the power demand, supply and shortfall, also optimum use of infrastructure installed by the central government. The data would be updated in real-time. A mobile app and message service would also be started on the same, soon.
With this initiative we would have an idea how much power is being fed in every rural feeder. There is lack of actual information on power outages in rural areas. This also poses questions on the work done in rural electrification. The idea is to have a single database on rural electrification,” said a senior power ministry official in the know.
The official said this would put equal onus on the state government along with the Centre. While power generation, transmission and planning is with the Centre, power distribution and supply is a state subject.
Currently, rural electrification is being monitored manually through a task-force of electrical engineers on ground in every un-electrified village. These ‘Gram Vidyut Abhiyantas’ (GVA), as named by the power ministry, report the status of electrification and guide the residents about power scenario. However, with large villages under one GVA, the task of monitoring is scattered and quality and time period of power supply is not displayed on the current GARV dashboard. GARV is a web portal and mobile app launched to track the progress of rural electrification.
“We are also looking at the possibility of linking the data on power supply to GARV app. But that is at a concept stage. Currently, the focus is to bring states on board to install modems on feeders and track the progress,” said a senior power ministry official.
The official said as of now, Gujarat, Bihar, Karnataka, some villages in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra have SCADA systems installed on some feeders. To begin with, these would be connected on the national portal and then other states would subsequently become a part, said the official quoted above.
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