Report by Kamgar Ekta Committee correspondent
Andhra Pradesh government is constructing a new capital at Amaravati, near Guntur. For power supply to the new city, the Andhra Pradesh government has invited expression of interest (EOI) from private power companies for “establishment and operation of electrical distribution network with distribution and retail supply of electricity in Amaravati Capital City.” This means that the new capital will have a fully private electricity distribution system from day one.
A few months back, the Andhra state government had announced another measure towards privatisation of electricity distribution. Large consumers consuming more than 300 MW electricity can apply for parallel distribution licence. The major beneficiaries of this policy would be hyper-scale data centres being set up by Adani, Reliance, Google, Meta and other corporates near Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. This policy amounts to partial privatisation of electricity distribution in the state. The state government owned distribution company (DISCOM) will be left with only small consumers while large consumers will arrange their own private sourcing of electricity.
It is reported that the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC) of Goenka group has shown interest and already done field visits to Amravati. It’s the same group which took over the power distribution in Chandigarh at a throwaway price when it was privatised in February 2025.
The aim of each of these measures is to weaken the DISCOM so that at a later date it can be privatised. Privatisation of DISCOMs is the agenda of big power monopoly groups of the country like Tata, Adani, Goenka, Jindal, Torrent, etc. This anti-worker, anti-people agenda is being pushed by both the central and state governments at their behest.