Report of Indian Institute of Public Administration ... - Ministry of Power

DISTRIBUTION
Professional Directors
State Reports (Vol.-III)
Study on `Impact of Restructuring of SEBs’
In order to professionalise the Board of the power companies, it is felt that there
should be 50 per cent independent directors who could be professionals in various
fields. Presently the Boards of all the five companies have Government nominees
only. It is felt that the Power Finance Corporation, the Rural Electrification
Corporation and the Commercial Banks from whom the power companies have
borrowed heavily, should be empowered to nominate their nominees as directors. In
many of the Government undertakings, non-officials have been appointed as directors
but the power sector companies do not seem to have even a single director who is
from outside the Government.
Whole Time Members
In RSEB, the top-level management consisted of the Chairman and three whole time
Members looking after generation, distribution and finance respectively. Major policy
decisions used to be taken by the Committee consisting of the Chairman and three
whole time Members. These Members substantially contributed to the decisionmaking
process and there used to be adequate debate and discussions on various
issues in the meetings of the Committee. But after restructuring, most of the power
companies do not have whole time Members. The top management consists of the MD
only. This is bound to affect the quality of the decision making process. It is prudent
to entrust major decisions to a Committee of whole time members rather than to a
single officer (MD).
Agricultural Connections
(a) During the pre-restructuring period, the number of pending applications used to
be around 1.25 lakh. During the last three years, with the release of all time high
agricultural service connections, the public expectations have gone up and in
spite of release of a large number of connections during the past three years, the
number of pending connections has risen to 2.20 lakh.
DISCOM-Wise Agricultural Connections Released During 1998-99 to 2001-02
1998-1999 1999-2000 2000-2001 2001-2002
Nursery General Total Nursery General Total
Nursery/
special
General Total
Nursery/
special
General Total
13333 11718 25051 8674 14268 22942 15509 10561 26070 8123 6928 15051
6.56