NEW DELHI, Sept. 20 (UPI) -- India has stressed the need to create more players in the area of power-equipment manufacturing.
Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said this will be one of his major initiatives in the coming few months. Delivering the keynote address at the India Electricity-2007 conference in New Delhi Thursday, Shinde said a lack of adequate domestic manufacturing capacity for generation equipment has been a major bottleneck in the way of timely completion of generation projects; therefore, creating more players in this field is the only way to increase capacities, bring in cost-competitiveness and accountability to timeliness.
Shinde said the capacity addition of 78,000 MW in the next five years is not too ambitious a target as various projects of a total capacity of 50,000 MW are already under implementation and the rest is expected to be placed by the end of this year. He said there was a plan to establish a state-of-the-art IT-enabled energy accounting system all over the country to reduce aggregate technical and commercial losses of around 35 percent to a much more respectable level of 15 percent.
