By Amit Prasad,
Director of Smart Grid, New Delhi Municipal Council

DMC is one of the three local bodies in Delhi. It was made purposely to cater to the needs of Lutyen’s Delhi for specific requirements in VIP area. One of the functions of NDMC is electricity distribution. With the increasing demand of electricity there is a need to find the ways to reduce outages and consumption.

Quality of electricity is also becoming an issue as we are buying more and more equipments sensitive to electric fluctuations like microwaves and TV. But the information technology is not embedded in the network that brings electricity to us. The parameters of the network is not being monitored.

Smart grid is a very new concept and it is only in the initial phases. So today’s grid is fragmented, compartmentalized and have one way communication. It does not utilize renewable resources and it is still not known how much electricity will come from these resources.

But future smart grid would be highly interconnected and integrated with two way communications. For example, if smart grid meter is installed one would know how much electricity is consumed and if a person is consuming extra the electricity can be disconnected anytime. Also, if it is known that there will be heavy load shedding at a certain point of time then instead of having a blackout, using smart meters and switches heavy loads could be cut off.

For infrastructure smart grid has tied up with Infosys. It has analysed weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats of the new technology as it is very difficult in the government to adopt and implement it. IT people in government will vouch and fight for it. They will meet resistance from all sectors.

Today there is a need to put devices and sensors at all places where faults lie like analyzing temperature of transformers and other equipments. This is to ensure more reliable power to the consumers.
These are some areas where NDMC has chalked out. This is the roadmap for next ten years. The risks factors are also typically the same as in any other IT project.

Other initiative of NDMC is mapping everything on GIS for property. All the services will converge on every property be it water connection, electricity, garbage service point etc. and will be merged in a single home page to all the consumers.

It is very important to computerize property  tax system and make it available online to public. There were ten lakh property tax owners and for filing tax returns once in a year every citizen was coming to office at least five times. Still filing returns was difficult as forms were complicated and there were lot of parameters which needed to be filed. When things were complicated people used to go to the middlemen and ended up paying more. By making it computerized people now can file their returns from home and in addition they are also saving fuel and in turn our environment. In the newspaper it was mentioned that 5000 MW plant was coming up but the question is where it is coming from.

We are burning carbon fuel and our reserves are non renewable. Gandhiji said there is enough for our needs and not for our greed. So we should live into our interests and not eat our bank balance.

In this way NDMC resolves to intensify its efforts in providing better civic services to citizens.