Result: More than a third of the power generated in India continues to go into a black hole.
The APDRP was launched at the beginning of the tenth Plan but given the poor results, the government decided to launch a new restructured APDRP in April 2007 - the beginning of the eleventh Plan. Eight months down the line and the plan is still "in process."
"Everyone is talking about distribution reforms but it is just all-talk and no-action," said a senior power ministry official.
The revamped APDRP - which proposes fixed targets for loss reduction and links fund drawals to performance - has been delayed because of the inability of the parties concerned to reach a consensus.
According to power ministry officials, there are some "minor issues" that need to be ironed out between the finance ministry, Planning Commission and power ministry but no one seems to be in hurry for a solution.
"The delay in finalising APDRP-II is seriously affecting the momentum of reforms started in power distribution," said the official.
The prime minister has identified transmission and distribution losses as one of the priority areas for action. In his address to the chief ministers' conference in May, he had said, "The APDRP scheme is being revised and the contours of this revised scheme will be announced within two months."
The Planning Commission, the finance ministry and the power ministry were expected to finalise this scheme within this time-frame, he added. A power ministry official now says the new scheme might be implemented in March or April 2008.
The delay in announcing the new APDRP - which, at Rs 50,000 crore (Rs 500 billion), is much larger in scale than the original programme - has left states like Gujarat and West Bengal, which want to avail of the APDRP funds, in a quandary. Incidentally, no fresh projects have been sanctioned in the past two years, said a power ministry official.
The original APDRP suffered from many infirmities. Despite an outlay of thousands of crores, the aggregate technical and commercial losses (AT&C, a wider measure of transmission and distribution losses) in the country have come down by only 1 to 2 per cent to about 35 per cent today.
Some states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Sikkim, Manipur and Jammu and Kashmir have AT&C losses of 60 per cent or more.
The original scheme was also criticised for not being focused. States were given grants and loans upfront without any reliable energy accounting.
