National Smart Grid Mission (NSGM), 2015

Policy Update
Purbaa Jagannath

Background

The journey of smart grid in India is not new and it’s even pre-dating the National Smart Grid Mission (NSGM). The Ministry of Power (MoP) has set up the India Smart Grid Task Force (ISGTF) and the India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF) in 2010 to give policy guidance for smart grid technologies. In 2012, 12 smart grid pilot projects, involving 11 states (Assam, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka, Punjab, Telangana, Tripura, Puducherry, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) and costing about ₹254 crore, were sanctioned to test functionalities like advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), peak load management, outage management, etc., with 50 per cent funding support from the MoP.

As these pilots continued, they realised that they would require an institutional place, not just project approvals, to work on smart grid initiatives. Hence, a National Smart Grid Mission has been created under a MoP Office Memorandum dated 27 March 2015 with a dedicated team from January 2016 onwards. NSGM was designed with its own resources, autonomy, functional and financial independence and implemented a Project Management Unit (NPMU) within POWERGRID as one stop point for the Government of India’s thoughts on smart grids.

NSGM’s goals are to enhance the reliability of electricity networks, to make electricity networks suitable for distributed generation by renewable energy sources and to — via smart meters — enable consumers to better control and reduce their electricity use. It also foresees capacity building of the distribution-sector staff. NSGM’s structure was designed to be flexible, with the understanding that smart grid technology is continually evolving and would not have to be sent back to a number of ministries for every decision.

Functioning

NSGM has a three-tiered institutional structure. The Governing Council headed by the Minister of Power, which approves policy overall, is at the apex. Below it, lies the Empowered Committee headed by the Secretary (Power) that approves, monitors and reviews specific projects and guidelines. A Technical Committee headed by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) Chairperson gives technical inputs on standards and new technologies in a supportive role.

The NPMU is supported in its operation by specific units for policy and planning, data management and cyber security, R&D and standards, projects, training and capacity building and a Smart Grid Knowledge Centre. State Level Project Management Units (SLPMUs) were established across states, with the state power secretary as the chairperson and representatives from DISCOMs, regulators, academia and NGOs, to foster collaboration at the state level — there are 19 states with an SLPMU as of 2021, up from 8 states in 2020.

NSGM’s outlay has been trimmed lower a number of times with its evolution. Total estimated cost of NSGM activities in the 12th Plan (2017-22) was ₹980 crore of which budgetary support was ₹338 crore. This was recast for 2017-18 to an outlay of ₹990 crore (with budgetary support of ₹312 crore) and extended on the same terms till 2020-21, and again recast for 2021-22 to ₹136.95 crore, of which ₹45.42 crore is budgetary support.

This downtrend is explained by the shift in NSGM’s role from being a direct co-funding provider of pilot infrastructure (up to 50 per cent in 2021, reduced to 30 per cent in 2022) to a more light-touch provider, such as establishing standards, building capacity and maintaining data systems.

Today, NSGM’s main activities include: preparation of model Standard Bidding Documents (SBDs), including a model opex based SBD for Advanced Metering Infrastructure Service Providers (AMISPs) that are now being used by the DISCOMs to contract rollout of smart metering projects; upkeep of “All India Smart Metering Status” dashboard, which compiles deployment data from nodal agencies; operation of a Smart Grid Readiness Self-Assessment Tool and cost-benefit analysis tools for utilities; and training and capacity building programmes for state PMUs and project teams.

Since the launch in 2021, the two schemes operate in a complementary, but overlapping, manner; RDSS is responsible for the majority of the financial funding and physical scale (a targeted deployment of more than 25 crore smart meters), while NSGM retains the role of establishing the standards, maintaining the data dashboard and knowledge management which underpin that scale.

Performance

What has come since NSGM’s own pilot portfolio is small compared to what has since developed. The 11 pilots worth approximately ₹247 crore have been completed with 50 per cent MoP funding and outage-management, peak-load management and AMI functionalities have been demonstrated with installation of around 1.6 lakh smart meters under these pilots. At the time of this writing in January 2022, 9 of these pilots have been declared complete and have had financial closure, and 6 pilots have met their AT&C loss-reduction goals.

The current larger picture of smart metering in India is now clearly dominated by RDSS and the NSGM dashboard is used as the backbone of the data. According to the NSGM hosted All India Smart Metering Status dashboard, as of November 2024, around 22.2 crore consumer meters were sanctioned across the nation and about 1.68 crore or about 8 per cent of it was installed; distribution transformer (DT) metering had about 4 per cent (52.7 lakh), feeder metering had about 42 per cent (2.05 lakh) out of sanctioned meter count.

After 1 year, the progress was quite remarkable: 5.14 crore mTRs (23 per cent) of consumer meters, 13.05 lakh DT mTRs (25 per cent) and 1.62 lakh feeder mTRs (77 per cent) were installed as of 31 December 2025. As of 30 June 2026, total number of smart meters installed till date (including the legacy central schemes such as NSGM) is 7.24 crore, of which 5.73 crore (around 28.2 per cent of the target of 20.33 crore sanctioned by RDSS) have been installed under RDSS.

Figure 1: Smart metering status across India (as of 31 December 2025)

Meter type	Sanctioned	Installed	Installed (%)
Consumer meters	22.43 crore	5.14 crore	23%
Distribution Transformer (DT) meters	53.2 lakh	13.05 lakh	25%
Feeder meters	2.09 lakh	1.62 lakh	77%
Source: All India Smart Metering Status, National Smart Grid Mission website, Ministry of Power, as accessed 31 December 2025; reproduced via PRS Legislative Research, Demand for Grants 2026-27 Analysis: Power and New & Renewable Energy (10 February 2026).

Deployment remains highly uneven across states. As of the same date, Delhi had reached 100 per cent consumer smart-meter deployment, and Ladakh (94 per cent), Haryana (85 per cent) and Chandigarh (82 per cent) were also well advanced; by contrast, Tamil Nadu and Kerala stood below 2 per cent, Goa and Meghalaya at 0 per cent, and West Bengal at just 3 per cent.

Figure 2: National AT&C losses, 2018-19 to 2024-25

Year	AT&C losses (%)
2018-19	~22.0
2020-21	21.91
2023-24	16.12
2024-25	15.0–16.16*
Source: Report on Performance of Power Utilities 2024-25, Power Finance Corporation (February 2026); PRS Legislative Research, Demand for Grants 2026-27 Analysis: Power and New & Renewable Energy (10 February 2026); Ministry of Power, cited in Impressive Times (8 December 2025).

Impact

The most concrete impact of NSGM was not so much in the number of meters that it funded but in the technical and institutional basis it provided for the much bigger RDSS-driven rollout. There are a number of NSGM outputs that are now being used at the national level by DISCOMs and nodal agencies (PFC and REC) under RDSS, such as the opex-based AMISP contracting model, model SBDs, the smart-grid readiness self-assessment tool and the shared metering dashboard. Likewise, the Cybersecurity in Power Sector Guidelines, 2021, which has been developed by NSGM’s Data Management and Cyber Security Unit, provided the template for the newer cybersecurity architecture in the Power Sector.

In terms of outcomes, national AT&C losses have declined from approximately 22 per cent in 2018-19 to about 15 per cent in 2024-25; and out of the six pilot projects in the NSGM, it is worth noting that each individual project met or exceeded its loss-reduction goals. The improvement is, however, largely due to the financial and physical influence of RDSS’s much larger footprint, and not due to NSGM’s own funding, which has considerably decreased since 2021.

In addition, implementation in the near term has started to take shape with the help of NSGM’s Smart Distribution Roadmap. It imagines a Phase I (up until 2026) to provide 50 per cent coverage of smart distribution technologies, which also includes DT and feeder metering, AMI and consumer indexing, while Phase II (up to 2030) focuses on full coverage and SCADA, distribution/outage management systems, and asset mapping.

Based on this roadmap, five cities (NDMC, Guwahati, Varanasi, Indore and Patna) have been identified for implementation of smart distribution under the monitoring committee of RDSS, and Detailed Project Reports have been approved for implementation in Varanasi, Gurugram, Faridabad, Noida and Kanpur. For consumers, prepaid, app-based recharge and real-time consumption data is now starting to materialise – albeit not everywhere yet – in these pilot geographies.

The Computer Security Incident Response Team for the Power Sector (CSIRT-Power), in the context of cybersecurity, which is an explicit area of NSGM’s mandate, was established in April 2023 and formally inaugurated in September 2024 at the Northern Regional Power Committee (NRPC) in New Delhi with the support of six sub-sectoral CERTs, two in each sector (thermal, hydro, transmission, grid operation, renewable energy and distribution). This has since been further confirmed by a POWERGRID Centre of Excellence in Cybersecurity at IISc Bengaluru and a Draft CEA (Cyber Security in Power Sector) Regulations, 2025 currently in the finalisation process.

Emerging Issues

There’s no word that NSGM will continue beyond March 2024, although NSGM’s original physical-rollout mandate was transferred to RDSS, which was given an explicit two-year extension to March 2028. It is unclear in the public domain how monitoring responsibility is split between NSGM’s Empowered and Technical Committees, and RDSS’s Inter-Ministerial Monitoring Committee, and whether NSGM’s mission of standards and data is being adequately resourced with the mission several times larger than it was under NSGM.

However, system-level metering (DT and feeder meters) is not as widespread as consumer metering in most states and is still behind on feeder metering (77 per cent) and consumer metering (23 per cent) in several large states, and is vital for loss attribution and real-time grid balancing, not just for consumer billing. Consumer resistance and lack of knowledge persist.

Meanwhile, protests have been reported in states such as Jammu & Kashmir where the smart-meter rollout has been met with organised opposition amid reports of progress towards project goals. However, some of the major challenges that were identified for faster implementation were the resistance from consumers, lack of awareness among consumers, non-availability of meters at premises and consumer-indexing errors and lack of interoperability among vendors, as revealed by NSGM’s own review in 2025.

Securing data and complying with regulations are still following the deployment curve. Meanwhile, tens of millions of meters connected to the AMI network are already gathering and transmitting consumer data, while binding CEA cybersecurity regulations for the power sector are still in draft – and won’t take effect until April of 2027. The obligation to comply with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which requires consent, data-security and breach-notification procedures, has not yet reached the state of an audited minimum standard, and is still evolving.

Distributed generation, charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EV), and integration of renewable energies are among the founding items of NSGM’s 2015 goals and are currently mostly pilot projects. Despite the parallel rooftop-solar (PM Surya Ghar) and EV-adoption targets in India, there is no clear and NSGM endorsed framework to connect LAR deployment with TOT and DR initiatives at the consumer level.

Way Forward

Publish an up-to-date continuation notification with an explicit division of monitoring responsibilities from the Inter-Ministerial Monitoring Committee of RDSS, stating the monitoring responsibilities of NSGM in relation to the sector’s expansion and the costed outlay for the current period; ensure that NSGM standards, data and knowledge role is not duplicated and that its funding is not left underfunded as the sector expands.
Make future central assistance more explicit for DT progress rather than consumer meters having to carry the burden of the cost of metering. Only metering information from the system level will allow for accurate loss accounting, quick outage response and integration of renewable energy at the grid edge.
Coordinated consumer communication across or within state and locality by SLPMUs (and not by AMISP contractors alone) to directly engage the types of billing-transparency and privacy concerns that have led to resistance in some states like Jammu & Kashmir.
Implement binding regulations regarding CEA cybersecurity and compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2026 for AMISPs, earlier than the currently notified 2027 effective dates, as AMI systems are already processing consumer data in large quantities today.
To ensure outage-management, SCADA and asset-mapping are not limited to a few pilot geographies, add time-bound and public milestones and funding for reform to the Smart Distribution Roadmap’s Phase I, which was initially begun with five cities, and on the same model that RDSS applies to DISCOMs.
Include distributed generation and electric mobility clearly in NSGM’s results framework to ensure that both emerge as part of the natural growth of metering and not as an afterthought and under-resourced afterthought.

References

About the Contributor

Purbaa Jagannath is an intern with IMPRI, currently pursuing her master’s in Social Work at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research interests lie in social science, governance, and social issues.

Acknowledgements

The author extends sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for their guidance and support along with the reviewers Sneha Kohli and Gowri Kodali for their valuable feedback and insights.