Gujarat, Kerala and Rajasthan are the top three performing States under Niti Aayog’s State Energy and Climate Index (SECI), which is an indicator of a State’s performance with respect to six indicators including Discom performance, access, affordability and reliability as well as clean energy initiatives.
SECI (Round I) ranks the States’ performance on six parameters — DISCOM’s performance, access, affordability and reliability of energy, clean energy initiatives, energy efficiency, environmental sustainability and new initiatives. Parameters are further divided into 27 indicators. Based on the composite SECI Round I score, the States and UTs are categorised into three groups: Front Runners, Achievers, and Aspirants.
The country-level scores of each parameter are calculated as an average of the State-wise score for their respective parameters. The overall score for India works out to be 40.6. The average score at the national level for DISCOM’s performance is 56.8. The average scores for access, affordability and reliability, and environmental sustainability are 46.4 and 37.7, respectively.
For clean energy initiatives and energy efficiency, at the national level, the average scores are 22.2 and 29.1, respectively, while the all-India average score for new initiatives is 11.1.
Top performers
Overall, among the larger states, Gujarat, Kerala and Punjab are the top three performers, while the bottom three performers are Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
For the smaller states, Goa, Tripura, and Manipur are the top performers, while Meghalaya, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh are the bottom three states.
Among Union Territories, Chandigarh, Delhi, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu are the top performers, whereas Andaman and Nicobar, Jammu and Kashmir, and Lakshadweep are the bottom three performers.
Discom performance
The Discom performance indicator is a key metric while judging a State’s performance. It consists of nine indicators — debt-equity ratio, AT&C losses, average cost of supply (ACS), average realisable revenue (ARR) gap, T&D losses, time of day (ToD)/time of use (ToU) tariffs for consumers, DBT transfer, open access surcharge, regulatory assets and complexity of tariffs.
Among the large States, Punjab is the best-performing State because of comparatively-higher scores achieved by it in indicators such as debt-equity ratio, regulatory assets, open access surcharge and complexity of tariff. Among the smaller States, Goa is the top performer in this category.
Way forward
Through the SECI, the States can explore and benchmark themselves on various parameters. For instance, in terms of energy efficiency, larger States like Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra have done well, while in terms of Discom’s performance, two small UTs — Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli have done well.
The best practices for all indicators in better-performing states can be adopted by other States to improve their performance. SECI will help States to understand their performance across multiple parameters/indicators.