Power cuts in India: Solar can be the solution

Despite the power ministry’s claims that 26 states out of 32 in the union have zero power
deficit, rural india has been experience substantial power cuts, some spanning more than an
hour, serveral times during a month.

For serverval months the power ministry’ website vidyutpravah. in has been reporting zero
power deficites for a large number of states. Similar data is also reflected at the Nationl
Load Despatch centre’s data centre which provides power supply and demand data on
regular basis.

Although there are no data available on a pan india scale, substantial power cuts are
experineced by households in smaller cities, towns and rural regions all through the
country,”said anish de, partner infrastructer, governemt and health care at KPMG.

Prayas is an NGO that has been monitoring power cuts through specially designed, mobile
data enabled monitors at 152 location of which 31 are in rural india and 121 in urban
locations.

Data collected by the NGO indicated that in april this year 46% of these locations
experineced outages for more than 15 hours, while 24 % of these locations experienced
more than 30 interruptions each greater than 15 minutes.

About 16% experienced average 30 minutes of outage in theevening. However prayas data
also indiacates that power cuts in april have been marginally less than the previous month –
March 2016. During March 2016, 61% of locations experienced outages for more than 15
hours, 11% for more than 15 minutes while 22% experienced average 30 minutes of outage
in evening.

“Power availability in large number of connected villages would not be more than 12 hours a
day. for samller cities and towns power cuts ranges between an hour to five on an average.
A large number of north indian states suffer from major power cuts while those in uttar
pradesh.