New Delhi: Grid Controller of India Limited (Grid-India) has floated an Expression of Interest (EoI) to invite domestic entities to build home-grown software for the control rooms that run the national grid. The EoI it issued seeks developers for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and energy management system (EMS) applications. Up to five developers will be selected, and each can receive up to Rs 10 crore from the funding.
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The EoI estimated the total indicative outlay at up to Rs 50 crore, including taxes, and said the funding would be finalised subject to the availability of funds and approval of the competent authority. Responses are due by November 5.
Operators at the National, Regional and State Load Despatch Centres (NLDC, RLDCs and SLDCs) depend on these systems round-the-clock. SCADA brings in live readings from substations and power plants. EMS applications then use that data to analyse the network, test it against possible failures and keep generation in step with demand.
The EoI has been issued on behalf of a working group made up of the Ministry of Power, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, CEA, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Power Grid and Grid-India, and it describes the money on offer as a seed fund. The document links the project to the draft National Electricity Policy 2026, which it said mandates an indigenous SCADA/EMS system.
The EoI comes against the backdrop of a three-year trajectory unveiled by a Central Electricity Authority (CEA) committee for replacing imported Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems across India's power grid with domestically built ones. The panel set financial year milestones running from 2026-27 to 2028-29 for 38 software modules and 25 hardware items. It followed a Ministry of Power decision that the systems are not to be imported after 2030.
Developers will build 19 applications. They start with the foundation every control room relies on, which is the network database. The EoI wants it built on the Common Information Model (CIM), an international standard for describing power networks, so that every load despatch centre works from the same vendor-neutral model of the grid. According to the EoI, the modelling tools in use were tightly coupled to individual vendors’ SCADA systems. This had caused problems with operation, maintenance, migration and interoperability.
The SCADA platform will sit on that database, together with a historian that archives operating data and web applications that share it with authorised users. Above these sits the analytical layer. It covers state estimation, contingency analysis, automatic generation control, dynamic security assessment and a simulator for training dispatchers.
All of it has to work at the scale of India’s grid. The SCADA applications will have to handle up to 20 lakh analog points and as many status points. The historian will have to keep 10 years of that data online at five-second intervals. The analysis tools must be able to model up to 10,000 buses, 25,000 transmission lines, 3,000 solar generators, 2,000 wind farms and 500 battery storage systems.
The EoI covers software only. The CEA committee had estimated software at about 25 percent of a SCADA system’s cost, with hardware making up the remaining 75 percent. The working group has set up a separate sub-group to review the indigenisation of hardware. In the meantime, developers must ensure their applications run on Make in India-compliant hardware.
Each developer’s Rs 10 crore is spread across the 19 applications according to their weightage, and the analytical tools carry the largest shares. The state estimator, contingency analysis, security enhancement, automatic generation control and the dispatcher training simulator get Rs 1 crore each. The core SCADA platform, the historian and the CIM database get Rs 50 lakh apiece.
The money will be released in stages. Thirty percent will be paid once an application is developed and demonstrated. Another 30 percent will follow functional testing, and the final 40 percent will come after certification. To be accepted, an application must score at least 80 percent. Functionality carries 70 percent of the marks, and the user interface, judged by control room experts, carries the other 30 percent. Payment will be linked to the share of functions that developers successfully demonstrate.
Inside the CEA committee, Grid-India had taken the strictest position on the meaning of indigenisation: 100 percent indigenous development, including source code, architecture and lifecycle support. The committee chair endorsed that view.
The EoI sets out the terms. All design, coding and testing must take place in India. Registering an Indian subsidiary, branch, joint venture or affiliate of a foreign company will not count on its own. Neither will adapting, porting or rebranding a SCADA/EMS platform developed abroad. Developers can use commercial operating systems, databases and open-source tools, but every security-critical component must be written in India.
The intellectual property will stay with the developer. It must be owned and controlled by a company incorporated in India, with no restrictions originating outside the country, and developers will have to file an affidavit saying so. They must also keep a software bill of materials that lists every third-party and open-source component. All sensitive data must be stored within India.
Indian companies, public sector undertakings, government bodies and recognised start-ups can apply. So can companies working with academic and research institutions of national importance. Applicants can come in alone or in consortia of up to four partners. Each must bring power system expertise, either in-house or through a tie-up with an institution such as an Indian Institute of Technology, the Indian Institute of Science, a National Institute of Technology or C-DAC.
Applicants will be marked out of 100 and need 65 to qualify. Experience in real-time systems, competence in SCADA/EMS technologies and power system domain knowledge carry 15 marks each. The EoI said it was assessing capability and did not require a respondent to have already built a complete SCADA/EMS platform. Technical presentations are scheduled for December 5.
The project is meant to run for 36 months. Shortlisting will take the first five. Specifications will then be finalised with the selected developers over the next six months, and agreements will be signed in the 12th month. Development will run until the 27th month, overlapping with functional testing on a platform at a designated load despatch centre between the 20th and 31st months.
The CEA committee had flagged testing as a weak spot. The Central Power Research Institute (CPRI) told the committee that no dedicated cybersecurity or reliability testing existed for SCADA systems. Under the EoI, developers will bring their own hardware and commercial software to the test platform. Security will be checked through vulnerability assessment, penetration testing and source code audits by “CERT-In certified auditors.” in line with the IEC 62443 industrial cybersecurity standard. CERT-In is the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team.
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Applications that pass will be piloted in designated control rooms, running in parallel with the systems already in use. Each must run without interruption for at least seven days. Certified developers will be considered for purchase preference when SCADA/EMS systems come up for upgrade, subject to the eligibility conditions of those procurements. The EoI is not a tender, however. Funding remains subject to the availability of funds and approval from the competent authority.
