NEW DELHI: In a bid to help Pakistan alleviate its energy crisis, India is willing to set up a power transmission line across the border, sources in the Indian Energy Ministry said, however, they said that the main obstacle remained building a political will around the move.
Pakistan is facing a shortfall of over 4,500 megawatts of power resulting in unprecedented load-shedding. Since taking over, Prime Minister Sharif has vowed to address the concerns on power crisis and has dubbed the issue as one to be dealt with as a matter of priority.
The country, which already purchases electricity from Iran, has sought the supply of 500 megawatts of power from India to alleviate some of the acute energy crisis it is currently facing.
A delegation from the Indian Power Ministry led by Joint Secretary Rita Acharya visited Pakistan as part of this earlier this week. They discussed the broad contours of the proposed arrangement and explored points which can be used to hook-up to the grid in Pakistan through a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) line.
However, details and modalities of the purchase and the techno-commercial as well as sovereign arrangements still need to be worked out.
Sources said the transmission line may not take very long to build and power could start flowing in matter of months, even though India will have to build a transmission network at its end and transmission lines for power transmission may need to be developed. A formal timeline was not offered.
However, they said that the main obstacle remained building a political will around the move.
India has an installed capacity of over 2,11,000MW plans to add another 88,000MW electricity by March, 2017.
