India’s power sector facing shortage of skilled workforce?

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India, the third largest electricity producer in the world, is facing skilled manpower shortage in its expanding power sector which boasts of a unified national grid that is vulnerable to cyberattacks.

The government is actively looking to increase its skilled and professional manpower base to tackle dynamic fields such as cybersecurity and Artifical Intelligence (AI) as the country plans to increase its transmission grid network by 34 percent till 2030, according to senior officials in the Ministry of Power. The capacity building is being seen through startups and involvement of reputed Indian institutions, apart from recruitment across its public sector enterprises.

AI and Cybersecurity experts

“The government’s Smart Meter Mission is one area where discoms and even government companies have to look for skilled professionals. Our target is to install 20 crore smart meters, so you can imagine the data generated through these meters. This data has to be used for the benefit of the consumers, the distribution utilities and also for the grid system operator. We are tying up with startups with expertise in AI for this,” said a senior ministry official.

The government is also looking for cybersecurity experts as the power sector is an important pillar in the country’s economic growth and hence, can be a target for cyber attackers who can cause significant disruptions in services and cause physical damage to the infrastructure. Cyberattacks can be in the form of spyware, malware, network hacking of the grid, or any power utility.

The lack of experts was highlighted by the Ministry of Power to the Parliamentary standing committee for energy, which later in its report issued this month stated, “With the advancement in technology, Cyber security is increasingly becoming critical to any organization. However, there are not enough qualified individuals to address increasing demand of these professionals.”

In 2022, Tata Power, India’s largest power generation company, confirmed that it had been hit by a cyberattack on its information technology (IT) infrastructure, impacting some of its IT systems. No further details of the attack were shared by the company, though.

Further, the government on March 17 informed the Parliament that machine learning, AI, data analytics, data mining, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, generative AI are some of the new technologies which will need trained manpower for modernization of India’s power distribution sector from a classical network to modern grid network.

Certified linemen and solar technicians

The government is also trying to certify and train the manpower who are working on contract basis in the power sector, starting from the linemen to supervisor in the fields of electrical safety, best operations and maintenance practices, information technology.

Besides, the government has identified PM-Surya Ghar- Mufti Bijli Yojana as another area where skilled workforce is needed. While the target is train at least 3 lakh personnel across the value chain of setting up a rooftop solar power plant, of which 1 lakh are to solar technicians. Against the target of 3 lakh, the government has been able to train 66,434 personnel so far under the rooftop solar scheme.