NEW DELHI – India mulls option of selling “cheap power” to South Asianneighbours and Myanmar on a long-term basis and wants state-run powerutility NTPC to expand overseas, Power Minister RK Singh said today.

Indian companies such as Reliance Power Ltd and Adani Power Ltd havealready signed agreements to supply power to Bangladesh, where India isfighting for influence with China. India also sells some electricity toNepal and Myanmar, but Mr Singh said it could sell more.

“Neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal and Bangladesh areviable markets… where the per-unit cost of electricity is very high,” MrSingh said in a statement released by the Power Ministry.

“There is huge opportunity to export cheap power to neighbouring countrieswhich will be beneficial for the entire region,” he said.

The ministry would look at sending teams to those countries to assessdemand for power imports, he said.

Mr Singh urged India’s top utility NTPC to set up power plants in othercountries and “become the world’s largest power producer”, but did not saywhere it should expand.

India became a net exporter of electricity in 2016, although it alsoimports from neighbouring Bhutan.

Mr Singh, however, said its power surplus would start to decline once allhouseholds are connected. Currently, around 300 million of India’s 1.3billion people are without electricity.

“If you look at the entire power sector, the demand has been suppressedbecause not everyone is connected,” Mr Singh said. “We have just startedtaking off and are going to enter double digit growth. What we see asexcess capacity today may not turn out to be enough if we unlock thatdemand.”

Many Indian power companies have struggled to repay loans in the past threeyears after expanding aggressively at the beginning of this decade, as acombination of tepid demand and uneven coal supplies hit their operations.- Agencies