Reliance To Enter Smart Electricity Metering Market As India Looks To Replace Over 25 Crore Conventional Meters

Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) is looking to enter the smart electricity meter market, adding more vigour to the world's largest smart electricity meter programme which is presently under implementation in India, reports Livemint.

RIL is said to be planning to leverage its Jio backbone and driven capabilities to offer meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services to the electricity distribution companies through narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) which serves as a low-power wide-area network radio technology standard.

This comes as India is pursuing a programme to replace 25 crore existing conventional meters to help cut distribution loss and raise annual revenues of the debt-laden electricity distribution companies. The installation of smart meters is expected to minimise human intervention in activities like metering, billing and collection, thus helping in reduction of theft or fraud.

It should be noted that Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had also urged all States and Union Territories (UTs) to replace all the conventional meters with smart prepaid meters over the next three years during her budget speech earlier this year.