Power Minister Manohar Lal on Friday said the Ministry is lagging in meeting the targets for laying transmission networks in the current financial year largely due to issues such as land acquisition and right of way (RoW).
The Minister emphasised on the need for expanding India’s transmission network considering the country’s rising power consumption.
“We need to increase the implementation speed. We are far behind in meeting the transmission target for this year (FY25). One of the reasons is land acquisition. We face difficulties in procuring land from farmers. Cost of land issue is there. Right of Way (RoW) issues also hinder project speed,” Manohar Lal during a media interaction on developments in the power sector.
The Minister did not provide details on the target. However, the Power Ministry said that 6,327 ckm of transmission lines (220 kV & above) and 51,500 MVA of transformation capacity (220 kV & above) have been added during April-January in FY25.
“To address these issues, the Ministry came out with a notification around three months back. It has been able to solve some issues with acquiring land from farmers,” the Minister said.
Compensation
The Ministry has increased the compensation for tower area from 85 per cent to 200 per cent of the land’s value. For the RoW corridor, compensation has been increased from 15 per cent to 30 per cent of the land value. Besides, the compensation has also been linked to the market value instead of the circle rate.
The Minister said that the government’s ambition to lay transmission lines from India to the UAE and Saudi Arabia is moving ahead. The subsea transmission cable project is in the pipeline with a project cost of around ₹40,000 crore. It has to be finalised.
India, which has one of the world’s largest synchronous national grids, has increased its transmission network by 67 per cent between FY14 and FY24 taking the network to 4.85 lakh circuit km (ckm) till FY24. These lines are for 220 KV and above.
The Ministry has been working on expanding and modernising the transmission grid, which effectively handled the record peak power demand of 250 GW last summer. These efforts have also led to a significant decline in peak shortages from 4.5 per cent in FY14 to 0.001 per cent in April-January FY25.