The Ministry of Power released the Electricity Act (Amendment) Bill, 2025 for public comments on 9th October 2025. The proposed amendments strengthen parallel licensing, exempts DISCOMs from supply obligation for consumers with demand > 1 MW, phases out cross-subsidy for Railways, Metro, and Manufacturing, and establishes a framework for non-fossil fuel obligations.
Building on 2 decades of developments in the sector, we're proposing HT deregulation or carriage-content separation for the HT segment - targeting 30-35% of sales and covering less than 0.3% of consumers (~ 9 lac consumers connected to HT network where open access is already operational). Under this approach, within 5 years of announcement of HT Deregulation consumers connected to HT voltage level will be classified as deemed open access consumers. For such consumers, DISCOMs do not have supply obligation and SERCs do not set supply tariffs. Deemed open Consumers will have to meet 100% of supply requirements from non-DISCOM, non-regulated sources. To facilitate such supply national and state level bulk supply licensees can be granted to de-risk market procurement for consumers. DISCOMs can be compensated via Supply Obligation Charge (capped Rs 2.5/unit), levied on deemed OA consumers only for 5 years. Essentially the suggested approach aims to substantially liberalise HT supply and bring in competition in supply.
This is a more desirable approach to furthering competition, than parallel licensing which has major implementation issues and litigation risk.
After the release of these ideas on 26th November, we received several comments and clarificatory questions from many sector experts. In response to these queries, we have compiled a short document to further the discussion.
Such comprehensive reforms certainly merit more discussion and fine tuning. Towards this objective, the proposed approach is elaborated below and is also accompanied with the short document with responses to questions.
Deck detailing approach
Summary of submission (6 pages)
Clause-wise comments (26 pages)