Draft Amendments to the Electricity Act 2003 Redux (2018) Devil is in the details or are there other risks?

Abstract

For any new policy, intervention or “solution”, a starting point is often asking what is the problem you are trying to solve? The draft Amendments to EA2003 appear to focus on distribution companies (Discoms) as the problem area for the Indian power sector, which is not a new revelation, and in many ways would be correct. A more nuanced examination of the issues, however, would find that it’s not Discoms per se that are the problem (they're not purposely inefficient or malicious), it’s the political environment in which they operate, that they do not have the resources or the freedom to operate in a commercially viable manner. While issues of affordability and the social contract for electricity as a basic public utility may necessitate changes to purely market operations, there are a number of different instruments available to address such issues, not all of which have been examined fully, let alone tried.