CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu Power Distribution Corporation Limited (TNPDCL) has postponed, for the ninth time, the last date for submitting bids for the tenders it floated in mid-March for the key smart meters rollout project to August first week.
Officials said that the present extension was mainly due to objections raised by a section of bidders regarding a Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) related clause. The previous extension mentioned the last date for bid submission as July 30 and opening date as July 31. These have now been respectively extended to August 4 and 5.
A senior TNPDCL official told TNIE that the as per existing FDI rules, non-resident entities from countries sharing a land border with India, like China and Pakistan, can participate only with prior approval from the union government.
However, the TNPDCL board initially introduced a special norm in the bidding document requirements (BQR) after getting approval from the Rural Electrification Corporation to this condition of prior approval from the centre.
Since some of the bidders raised objections to this, the TNPDCL decided to cancel this special norm and adopted the norms in the standard bidding document furnished by the Ministry of Power for the smart meter project under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), the official added.
Under the RDSS, a total of three crore smart meters are to be installed in Tamil Nadu. Although the Ministry of Power had initially set March 2026 as the deadline for completing this, the union government has extended the deadline to March 2028 since many states have not made adequate progress. As a result, the full completion of smart meter installation in Tamil Nadu is also expected to take two more years to complete, another official said.
Originally, the bids were scheduled to be opened on April 17 with officials ambitiously planning to finish the tender process by May. Since then, the bid opening date got pushed to May 7, May 23, May 30, June 10, June 20, June 27, July 18, July 31, and now August 5.