(Power Stream, Vol. 5, No.3, March 2008, p. 14)
In Indian power sector, the turnaround of Delhi discoms has been a big success story and has delivered a message to the entire world that public private partnership in electricity distribution sector would work. India looses more than Rs. 280 billion due to theft annually. Almost 2/3 of Delhi electricity distribution is catered by BSES. The reduction of AT and C losses in Delhi owes a lot to having the right metering strategies and choosing the right technologies to improve billing and containing energy theft.
While the obvious choice was to migrate from electromechanical meters to electronic meters, a need was felt to choose the right metering system at all levels (grid, distribution transformer and consumers), choose meters with enough tamper evident features, adopt efficient way of downloading the data from the meter (Handheld/AMR etc), analyse smartly the downloaded data to conclude theft and to up date the knowledge about latest techniques of theft.
