TG team led by Deputy CM Bhatti Vikramarka studies UG cabling project in Bengaluru

The Hindu

20-05-2025

HYDERABAD
A team of energy department authorities led by Deputy Chief Minister M. Bhatti Vikramarka, who holds the portfolios of Energy and Finance, visited Bengaluru on Tuesday to study the underground cabling taken up by the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Ltd (Bescom) as the Telangana government too is planning to go for UG cabling in Hyderabad beginning with some key areas.
Chairman and Managing Director of the TG-Transco D. Krishna Bhaskar, CMD of Telangana Southern Discom Md. Musharraf Faruqui and a few senior engineers of the two power utilities were part of the team led by Mr. Vikramarka. They were taken around the UG cabling works by MD of Karnataka Transco and Bescom Pankaj Pandey.
According to the Deputy Chief Minister, the visit was undertaken as part of the State government's plans to modernise the urban infrastructure and improve power supply systems' reliability, safety and aesthetics in rapidly growing metropolitan areas (Hyderabad). The visit commenced with a high-level review meeting hosted by the Bescom officials.
Through a power point presentation, Mr. Pandey explained to the visiting team on the Bengaluru Overhead (OH) to Underground (UG) Power Conversion Project, which he claimed had emerged as one of the country's most comprehensive urban power infrastructure transformations. He stated that the project launched in 2018–19 had already converted over 7,400 km of 11 kV OH lines and thousands of km of low-tension lines into UG or aerial bunched (AB) cables.
Innovation in UG cabling
A key innovation of the project was laying of the Optical Fibre Cable (OFC) ducts along the UG cable routes to enable future telecom leasing as a revenue stream. The Deputy Chief Minister of Telangana enquired about the design and implementation challenges.
The Bescom officials explained to Mr. Vikramarka and his team that the financial structuring of the project and it includes loans from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Rural Electrification Corporation (REC) and other public sector banks and that technical losses and electrical accidents had come down by 2% since the UG implementation.
On the readiness of OFC infrastructure for commercial use, the Bescom officials stated that while ducts were in place, the last-mile coordination with telecom operators and BBMP was in progress and that the role of Ring Main Units (RMUs) had ensured system reliability and had reduced downtime during faults.
Mr. Vikramarka appreciated the scale and execution discipline of the project and hoped that the study would benefit the urban grid modernisation to be taken up in Telangana, particularly in Future City. Later, the team visited a pilot site in Malleshwaram (15th Cross) where an Underground Distribution network, including an underground Distribution Transformer (DTR) system, was being implemented.
The site showcased how DTRs could be housed in fully buried chambers with accessible maintenance panels at the street level, freeing up urban space and improving safety, according to the officials accompanying the Deputy CM.