MUMBAI: Power Minister Piyush Goyal said that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi government is confident and determined to deliver on the promises made in the result and there is no room for delays.
Goyal, who received the ET Award 2015 for business reformer of the year, said that his ministry is working at resolving the problems of the beleaguered power sector and aims to build scale which will boost the manufacturing sector and also have a positive impact on the services sector.
“We have had to scale up at a drastic scale because the aspirations of the people in India do not leave us with much time. This increase in scale will be able to capture manufacturing in India along with service sectors and many other sectors,” Goyal said.
“Ultimately it is the scale, transparency, innovative thinking and financing that would be able to make a difference and attract investment in this country,’ he said.
The minister said that states are voluntarily joining programme UDAY (Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana), introduced by his government to revive the struggling state owned distribution companies (discoms), giving hope that the health of these discoms will soon improve.
“In solar power, we started the process of reverse bidding and I have set up the roadmap to scale up from 2.5GW to 100GW in 2022. That’s the scale at which manufacturing becomes extremely attractive,” Goyal said.
He candidly shared that solar industry players were concerned when the reverse bidding was introduced as solar power was more expensive than thermal but soon the bids came down. “When we did the reverse bidding everybody was concerned as to who would buy the solar power. Reverse bidding got us bids at Rs 5.7/unit to Rs 5.5 and ultimately even to Rs 4.63. This has happened because we have scaled up, identified the pain points and identified the counter party risks,” he said.
After receiving the award, Goyal said that the award will encourage him and his colleagues to work harder to deliver on their promises.
