A Supreme Court constituted three-member committee in its report has noted the absence of bird diverters in most of the existing power transmission lines in the ‘Priority and Potential Great Indian Bustard (GIB) habitat’ in Rajasthan and Gujarat.
The committee also found that the bird diverters currently installed on power lines are of poor quality.
A bird diverter is an assembly of reflector disc, clamps and connectors, with a glow in the dark feature, swinging and swaying on overhead cables so as to alert birds from a distance to change their path of flight to avoid collision with wires.
The committee was constituted in April last year to assess the feasibility of laying underground transmission lines in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat.
The committee’s report submitted on April 20 before the SC, was prepared by committee members Dr Rahul Rawat, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, New Delhi, Dr Sutirtha Dutta, Scientist, Wildlife Institute of lndia, Dehradun and Dr Devesh Gadhavi, Deputy Director of the Corbett Foundation.
The report records a note from two of its members, Dutta and Gadhavi, based on the two members’ personal field observations, “most of the existing power lines in’ the GIB Priority Area of Rajasthan and Gujarat have neither been installed with Bird Flight Diverters , nor have been laid underground (except a few lines of 66kV by GETCO which are being undergrounded in Gujarat for less than 10 km length in total) yet.”
It was also stated in the report that “the CEA (Central Electricity Authority) has received reports of the installation of poor-quality diverters on power lines that are falling off and are being found strewn below transmission lines, and has insisted power agencies to install good quality Bird Flight Diverter.”
The committee had received a total of eight applications for feasibility assessment, including three applications from Gujarat — two by Gujarat Energy Transmission Co Ltd (GETCO) and one by Paschim Gujarat Vij Company Ltd (PGVCL) — for either existing transmission lines or new transmission lines .
Among the three applications, technical report is awaited by the committee from the CEA for two of GETCO’s applications, while in the case of one application by PGVCL for existing 0.440 kV transmission lines, running approximately 533 km in length and passing through priority and potential GIB habitats, is under examination, with the committee seeking more details from PGVCL, which the company is yet to submit.
Two applications were submitted by GETCO to the committee for feasibility assessment.
The committee after discussing the two applications by GETCO, had forwarded the same to CEA to get their technical opinion from an engineering perspective “on the claimed non-feasibility of undergrounding these lines, if any,” and the committee is yet to receive a report from CEA in this regard.
,