Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu said that the TDP government brought the first reforms in the power sector and turned the state from power shortage to power surplus.
Speaking in the debate on the energy sector in the Legislative Assembly on Thursday, he said, “We brought power reforms in 1988. We divided it into distribution, generation and transmission. We brought energy auditing. We made AP the only state without power shortage”.
“We are happy to see the results of the reforms brought then. It was the TDP government that helped farmers with a slab rate from the situation of charging a unit for agriculture. In 2014, there was a power shortage of 22.5 million units in the state. I took it up as a challenge with the support of the central government”, he added.
The Chief Minister said that by December 2014, there was no power shortage anywhere and by January 2018, we had made it a state with surplus power. He said that AP was the first in the country to confirm that transmission losses were 23 percent in the past. He said that AP turned into without power cuts after bifurcation.
Chandrababu said that the Congress came to power at that time by using the electricity reforms made during the TDP regime. “Now I am proud to say that we are providing electricity to agriculture for 9 hours. When I first became the CM in 1995, there were power cuts for 10 to 15 hours. I thought about how the administration should be”, he said.
“I moved forward with plans accordingly. We brought in spot billing for meter reading. I studied the whole world. They criticized me for being a World Bank employee,” Chandrababu added. He clarified that people’s development is measured based on electricity consumption anywhere in the world.
He was furious that the YSRCP government had taken AP, which was an electricity surplus state, to a deficit situation. He said that the previous government imposed a surcharge if industries used electricity. He said that the per capita electricity consumption in AP has increased by 23 percent. He said that AP was the first state to generate 7700 megawatts of solar and wind power.
