Bihar State Power (Holding) Company Ltd is making all efforts to provide round-the-clock power supply to district headquarters from January.

Company officials claimed that the power supply has improved in the district headquarters in the past few months.

“Most of the district headquarters towns are getting around 20 hours of power supply. Efforts are on to provide 24 hours of supply and remove constraints in some of the district headquarters towns by the end of January,” energy department’s secretary-cum-chairman-cum-managing director Sandeep Poundrik said.

Poundrik was speaking at a function organised to give compensation to the kin of electrocution victims. Work is on to provide 12 to 14 hours of power supply in the rural areas of the state, he said.

Chief secretary Ashok Kumar Sinha has ordered the power company to make arrangements to provide round-the-clock energy supply in the district headquarters towns by December. The company officials believe that the target to provide power to the district towns can be achieved since the energy supply in the state has improved since August. The power supply shot up to 2300MW. The power supply in the state was 1200-1300MW in November last year.

The steps the power company are undertaking include laying new transmission and distribution lines, capacity augmentation of distribution transformers, transformers at power sub-stations, installing additional transformers and distribution transformers, setting up a transformer repair workshop in every district to replace burnt transformers in 24 hours in urban and 72 hours in rural areas. At present there are 14 transformer repair workshop in the state and work is on to set up six more.

The state would get increased power supply at its disposal at a regular interval from January 2014. The state government, which got its first 110MW thermal power station operational in Muzaffarpur on November 17, is expected to add 1800MW more from its own sources (generation and long term power purchase) in 2014.

The state would get its second unit of 110MW of Muzaffarpur Thermal Power Station operational in March 2014. Two units of 110MW of Barauni Thermal Power Station would be made operational in March-April and August-September next year. The state is also expected to get 660MW of power from two units of NTPC’s Barh Super Thermal Power Station by end-September 2014. Bihar would get another 100MW from the joint venture plant of NTPC and railways that is expected to start generation from July 2014.

The state would get power supply of 450MW from Essar from July 2014.