In the face of sweltering heat in most parts of the country pushing demand for electricity, the central authorities should announce in no uncertain terms that maintaining a grid discipline will remain sacrosanct and it will not hesitate to penalise the states over-drawing power from the transmission lines and putting the entire distribution system to a peril, as happened in 2012, Assocham cautioned.

Aerial patrolling of the grid both at the national and state levels along with better emergency restoration systems should become priorities, it said. 

Noting chinks in the transmission maintained by the Delhi Transco, a fully-owned company of the Delhi Government during the May 30 dust storm, the chamber said ''It is evident not enough investment has been made in upgrading the transmission systems and the transformers''.

Chamber secretary general D S Rawat said the local transmission network companies not only in Delhi but also in other states should install high-technology systems such as aerial patrolling of the high voltage lines and transmission, better emergency restoration systems, preventive maintenance and online equipment monitoring. ''Besides, the life cycle of the towers and transmission equipment should be strictly monitored and replacements should be done without any compromises''.

According to the Assocham paper, the over-drawal of power by some states had led to a complete collapse of the Northern Grid plunging more than half the country into blackout and it took days to restore the system in 2012.

''A country aiming to grow by a double digit and wanting to become global manufacturing hub cannot afford to compromise on continuous and quality supply of power,'' the paper said.    

While adequate capital investment has been made at the national level through the Power Grid Corporation of India, the state level networks need to catch up.  To its credit, the Power Grid Corporation had met its capital investment target of Rs 550 billion during the 11th Plan and executed projects worth Rs 427 billion in the first two years of the 12th Plan. The bluechip PSU has a capex plan of Rs 1 trillion during the 12th Plan.

The power distribution is a people-centric business and frequent outages lead to a ''kind of short-fuse situations that can result into law and order issues with the problem becoming a political   issue. The consumer does not understand the fine differentials between the responsibilities of state-owned transmission companies or the private firms in the distribution. It is the distribution companies which are the last mile connect with the consumers and they become butt of people's ire''.

The Assocham secretary general said, ''we cannot allow our citizens to be on short fuse. We need to look after them.''