Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy sought participation of Industry to achieve “Power For All” goal of Government . While speaking at Power For All Summit 2015 here today, Shri Goyal said “Events like Power for All Summit where you engage and discuss relevant issues are truly an education for us all and help us to device better mechanism to speed up our efforts to achieve 100 percent electrification targets. Referring to recently launched Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojna, he said, “UDAY is an entirely bottom up scheme which has emerged out of the culmination of the engagements with bankers, discoms, power producers, consumers bodies, state governments and all the other stakeholders over a long period of time.” Shri Goyal appealed transmission companies in the country to play a leadership role in explaining any loopholes in either bidding and evaluation process or its technical aspects etc
Shri Piyush Goyal said that the Government is planning to present amended Tariff Policy soon to ensure more and more transmission projects via bidding process only and said, “We will allow transmission projects to be filled out on nomination basis only in exceptional cases”. He added, “Capacity to the South has increased substantially. He further said that lot of efforts are being made in improvising Transmission sector and possibly Government can plan to double the capacity in Southern India in next three years. The Minister stated it’s the first time that a government has spent Rs 10,000 crore to set up transmission and distribution in North-Eastern areas of the country. The Minister added, “We have made serious efforts to expedite ongoing projects and bidding out new projects in last 18 months. I want to tell you that last year we achieved 100 percent of our transmission target for the first time in decades”.
The Minister also said that in our ministry, we are converting everything into app, to tell the people what we are doing & for monitoring work and said, “You can monitor our performance & also participate in our efforts, with the same enthusiasm, honesty and commitment like Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi. ” Shri Goyal informed that as on today, there is approximately 26 million tonnes of coal is available in 100 closed monitored power plants which nearly translate to 21 days coal availability in thermal plants. He also informed that Teesta Project in Sikkim which was stalled for 7 years is back on track.