Benchmarking study for the Indian electric utilities using data envelopment analysis

This paper presents a benchmarking analysis for assessing comparative cost efficiencies of Indian State Owned Electric Utilities (SOEU), which have been mainly responsible for the generation, distribution and transmission of electricity in India. Performance of twenty-six utilities was evaluated using the non-parametric technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA), and the impact of scale on the efficiency scores was also evaluated. The results indicate that the performance of several SOEUs is sub-optimal, suggesting the potential for significant cost reductions.