Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (MSEDCL) has appointed input-based distribution franchisees for two circles – Malegaon and Shil, Mumbra & Kalwa.
The Malegaon mandate has been clinched by CESC Ltd, an RP-Sanjiv Goenka company. In a stock exchange communication, CESC said that it has received a letter of intent from MSEDCL declaring it the successful bidder for the Malegaon Municipal Corporation area under the Malegaon circle.
In an independent announcement, Torrent Power said that it has emerged winner as the input-based distribution franchisee for the Shil, Mumbra & Kalwa sub-divisions under the Thane Urban Circle.
In both the cases, the tenure of the appointment will be 20 years.
The Shil, Mumbra & Kalwa sub-divisions have a consumer base of 2.15 lakh. In FY17, considered as the base year, the ATC losses for the given region were estimated at 47 per cent. The quantum of electricity supplied was 677 million kwh while net sales were only 376 million kwh.
It may be mentioned that in January 2007, Torrent Power was appointed DF for the loss-making Bhiwandi circle. This represented Maharashtra’s first experiment with private sector participation in the power distribution sector. Following the impressive turnaround staged by Torrent in Bhiwandi, the the ten-year contract was extended for another ten years, up to January 2027.
For CESC, this is first distribution franchisee mandate in Maharashtra. It may be recalled that towards the end of fiscal year 2012-13, CESC did win the DF mandate for the Ranchi circle in Jharkhand. However, this agreement was cancelled sometime in 2015, as were the mandates for the Jamshedpur circle that had gone to Tata Power. CESC made it big on the DF landscape by winning three DF appointments in Rajasthan—Bikaner, Kota and Bharatpur—during 2016 and 2017 It may be mentioned that CESC is also the distribution licencee — not franchisee — in Kolkata and Noida.
For Maharashtra, the appointment of the two DFs is a major comeback after some untoward experience with the Jalgaon and Aurangabad circles where the appointment of DFs had to be cancelled.
According to information compiled from various sources, the DFs currently active in India include CESC (three aforementioned circles in Rajasthan), Essel Utilities (Nagpur in Maharashtra and Muzaffarpur in Bihar), Torrent Power (Bhiwandi in Maharashtra and Agra in Uttar Pradesh), India Power Corporation (Gaya in Bihar) and SPML Infra (Bhagalpur in Bihar). [This list represents power distribution franchisees and not licencees.]
The author of this article, Venugopal Pillai, is Editor, T&D India, may be reached on venugopal.pillai@tndindia.com. The views expressed here are personal.