Calcutta, May 2: Power cuts may bother the people of Calcutta now and then but the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has ranked the power distribution system in the city second in terms of the number of trippings and time required to restore normalcy.

Greater Mumbai is at the top of the list while Delhi (BSES Rajdhani area) and Chennai occupy the 15th and 16th positions, respectively. The highest technical authority under the Union power ministry has released the report in the last week of April.

A key efficiency indicator for any distribution system is the reliability it offers to its consumers. To monitor the performance of distribution companies, the Central Electricity Authority has recently introduced a process to evaluate network reliability.

The evaluation is based on the number of trippings and outage duration of 11 KV feeders through which power is distributed in a locality.

Outage duration is the time within which a feeder that has tripped gets back to normalcy.

Trippings of high-voltage feeders result in disruption of power supply to consumers. The Central Electricity Authority has measured the number of times high-voltage feeders trip per month across all distribution systems in the country. Accordingly, the authority has come out with a ?top 20? list of power distribution systems in India.

The Central Electricity Authority?s report has brought cheers to the RP Goenka- controlled CESC, which provides power to the people of Calcutta.

Compared with CESC?s only one trip-out for every 10 feeders, both BSES Delhi and the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board, Chennai have 52 trip-outs for every 10 feeders, which means that the incidence of power cuts is much higher in these cities.

The trip-out is only 0.04 for 10 feeders in Greater Mumbai.

Kochi, which has 146 trip outs per 10 feeders, is placed last in the ?top 20? list. Incidentally, Hyderabad experiences about 120 trip-outs per 10 feeders.

The tripped feeder, in case of Greater Mumbai, gets back to functioning with 1.85 minutes. CESC takes 16.27 minutes to restore functions. In Chennai, it takes 52.90 minutes, in Hyderabad 202.80 minutes and in Delhi (BSES Rajdhani area) 672.06 minutes.

CESC managing director Sumantra Banerjee said, ?This level of reliability has been achieved through sustained technical and managerial effort to improve efficiency.?

CESC, with a strong technical arm, has already started training a group of Assam State Electricity Board (ASEB) officials on proper distribution practices. This training forms part of the restructuring exercise that has been initiated by ASEB.

Damodar Valley Corporation has also written to CESC to carry out a similar exercise for their officials.

The Central Electricity Authority evaluation is currently limited to towns with population of more than 8 lakh.

It is proposed to gradually cover all the towns in the country and work out the reliability evaluation indices in line with international practices.