About the Event

At this roundtable, we presented findings from the two major household surveys on consumer experience of electricity services to steer a multi-stakeholder discussion. The discussion brought together sector experts, officials from distribution companies (discoms) and electricity regulatory commission, and civil society representatives to deliberate on the need to look beyond access to basic electricity services. The objective of the workshop was to chart a path for universally accessible, reliable, quality, affordable, and clean power supply to the consumers in the years ahead. To achieve this, it is imperative to hear from key stakeholders, their views on the findings of our survey and help chart a work plan for the actors in the sector for the short to medium term.

CEEW conducted two studies, across 24 districts in UP, in 2018 to assess the opportunities and threats for power sector. The recent survey, conducted in collaboration with the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP) in the summer of 2018, carried across 10 districts, complements the ACCESS Survey, and highlights the challenges with metering, billing, and collection at the household-level in both rural and urban UP. This study analyses the perception of households towards electricity theft and non-technical losses, and attempts to unpack the determinants of consumer compliance.

Our 2015 study on energy access studied the energy consumption in more than 3,000 households, spread over 250 villages in 18 districts across the state. In 2018, we revisited the households to understand the changes in their energy consumption patterns, and to study the impact of government policies during intervening three years. The analysis from the gathered data provides a first-of-its-kind multi-dimensional and longitudinal view on energy access in the state.

Key Discussion Points

• Ensuring 24x7 reliable and quality power supply to the consumers is a priority. To facilitate this, huge investments on system upgradation, network expansion, and an increase in generation are required.
• Improving billing practices to ensure timely, accurate and, efficient billing based on the actual meter reading will directly impact the consumer satisfaction.
• Introducing innovative methods of revenue collection to create an efficient revenue collection process, and encouraging timely bill payments by consumers.
• Learning from best practices adopted by other states to improve billing, collection, and theft reduction will help in improving consumer experience and financial health of the discoms.
• Formulating a consumer satisfaction index to assess the impact of discom interventions on consumer satisfaction levels. This measure will help discoms evaluate their interventions and devise new way for improved consumer satisfaction levels.

Since February 2018, The Council’s Lucknow team, supported by the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation (SSEF), has been working towards building an ‘’affordable, reliable and accountable” power sector in Uttar Pradesh.