Virtually every village in the country today is electrified but the irony of the situation is there isn’t enough affordable power to go round. The amount of power consumed in 2018-19 is estimated at just roughly 4% more than that in 2017-18. Plagued by losses, the distribution companies (discoms) are unable to procure enough power even as a clutch of private sector generating companies (gencos), that are unregulated, struggle to stay afloat in the absence of adequate coal or gas. A good many have become stressed assets for their lenders; the Samadhan scheme has had very limited success in finding buyers for these. The supply of coal to power plants by Coal India, in the eleven months to February, was about 9.4% higher than in the corresponding period of 2017-18 but that was still lower than the allotted quantity. The quantity of gas made available was barely 29-31% of the allocation promised.
