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The Delhi government today conveyed its strong concern to the BSES Chairman over frequent outages in several pockets of the city and sought a concrete roadmap from the discoms for ensuring uninterrupted supply in the national capital in a timebound manner.

In a meeting at the Delhi Secretariat, Power Minister Satyender Jain also raised the issue of BSES owing "over Rs 8,000 crore" to various power entities with the company's chairman Lalit Jalan.

"We have sought a concrete roadmap from BSES and timeline for supplying uninterrupted power, considering Delhi has surplus power. We have put our concerns strongly as the city expected world class facility after the privatisation of the sector," a senior government official said. 

The official said BSES, which supplies power to nearly 70 per cent of the city through its discoms BYPL and BRPL, was likely to submit its proposals by early next week and that the two sides will again meet in another two weeks. The meeting came following the exchange of a number of letters between the government and the discoms. Jain had reprimanded BSES over its "atrocious performance" and its "failure" to augment the distribution network.

The discoms also put its side on the table, including difficulty in getting land and the issue of rampant power theft in certain areas of the national capital. Sources said the government "assured" it of help in this regard, provided a plan is prepared. BSES is owned by the Reliance¬ADAG headed by Anil Ambani.

BSES entities BRPL (BSES Rajdhani Power Limited) and BYPL (BSES Yamuna Power Limited) supply electricity to around 12 lakh and 16 lakh customers, respectively. The city's power sector was privatised in 2002. The national capital had on May 20 recorded its peak power demand of 6,188 MW. It had crippled the power infrastructure and led to outages in many parts of the city, which officials said was due to the inability of the distribution network to handle "overload".

Source: ET