It’s 6 a.m. on a cold January morning in 2002 in New Delhi. It’s still dark outside, and I’m in the kitchen preparing breakfast, packing lunches, and getting my two children ready to catch the school bus when, for the third time in a week, the power goes out. No lights, no mixer to finish my daughter’s puttu—her favorite rice dish—no kettle, no toaster. The bathroom is dark, and the kids are upset.

It will probably be hours before the power comes back on, so I grab a flashlight and light the candles that are set up around the house for these occasions. We’re behind schedule now. We pack the food we have, bundle up as the house turns chilly, and head outside, leaving a mess in the kitchen. We make our way to the bus stop in the dark—the streetlights are out, too—only to discover my daughter has missed her ride. Again. I’ll be late for work at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university where I am a professor of electrical engineering and teach power systems and smart grids. I just hope the power is on there.

This was a common scene for my family and all of Delhi in the early 2000s. Power outages happened almost daily and lasted hours. When the power was on, the quality was so poor that it would dim lights, flicker screens, and wreak havoc on appliances. Customer service at the power utilities essentially didn’t exist.

A child walks in July 2007 past a store in New Delhi specializing in reconditioned generators. The fear of power cuts during summer heat spurs demand for these generators so that residents can produce their own power.Nicholas Bradley/AFP/Getty Images

These problems had been getting worse through the 1980s and 1990s. The cause: an aging distribution grid bereft of crucial technologies, and electricity providers with little accountability. The situation became so bad that the city was losing more than half of its power through obsolete equipment and theft. These staggering losses meant that utilities got paid for only a fraction of the electricity they were trying to deliver. And the lack of funds prevented them from investing in better grid infrastructure.

But over the last quarter century, a remarkable effort by the government and the city’s distribution utilities has turned Delhi’s grid into a reliable, modern system. Power losses have shrunk from over 50 percent in 2002 to 5 to 6 percent in 2026—on par with France and Belgium, and better than Greece and Serbia. Delhi’s grid reliability index, a measure of how often electricity can be counted on, stood at around 70 percent in 2002 and has now topped 99.9 percent.

The bustling Main Bazar in the Paharganj neighborhood of Delhi increasingly uses more nighttime electricity, but reductions in electricity loss help counter demand. iStock

With reliable power, businesses across the city have blossomed. The streetlights are bright. The number of electric vehicles, including city buses, is growing daily. Quality of life has improved. Today, my family is comfortable year-round in our home despite Delhi’s scorching summers and cold winters. The chaos of losing power no longer hinders me from getting to work. The city still has problems—pollution, overcrowding, noise—but thankfully, reliable power is no longer among them.

The transformation of Delhi’s grid can serve as a model for other cities that suffer from decrepit power infrastructure. Regions of Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Venezuela are reeling from heavy losses in their distribution grids. Their problems look like Delhi’s 25 years ago. I believe it’s possible to improve electricity in these places by adapting the changes Delhi made. Here’s an inside look at how the city accomplished it.

Delhi’s Power Grid and Energy Mix

The city of Delhi hosts the capital of the Republic of India, and sits along the Yamuna River in the northern part of the country. It’s home to about 23 million people and is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Delhi’s grid includes thousands of kilometers of power lines, and peak electricity demand reached an all-time high this year of 8,748 megawatts. The city currently buys 76 percent of its power from central generating companies and private players from neighboring states. Energy generation within the city is restricted to natural gas and renewable sources. Nearly 48.5 percent of the city’s power comes from coal, about 26.5 percent from natural gas, and the rest from carbon-free sources, led by hydropower at 15.6 percent.

Tata Power replaced about 5 kilometers of overhead lines with underground cables, which reduced electricity loss and improved the aesthetics of Delhi’s streets, such as the Janta Flats in the Shalimar Bagh neighborhood.Tata Power-DDL

By the early 2000s, Delhi’s nearly 100-year-old power distribution system was in serious disrepair. Everything was old—lines, transformers, circuit breakers, switches. New grid technologies were needed to keep up with new kinds of electricity loads, but there was little money to upgrade components.

The shabby state of the grid caused many problems, most notably high electricity losses, where electricity vanishes primarily as heat. The cause of the losses was a classic electrical problem: too much current flowing through a network that wasn’t designed to carry it efficiently.

To understand the problem, it helps to understand how modern power grids work. Typically, they include generation, transmission, and distribution. After power is generated, transformers convert the electricity to high voltage levels—typically 132, 220, 400, or 765 kilovolts in India. Transmission lines then carry the power over long distances to receiving substations that are closer to where customers need electricity. Transformers then step down the voltage (to 66, 33, or 11 kV in India) and distribution lines branch out, carrying the power to customers. The whole grid works primarily on alternating current.

In a healthy grid, the utility will take compensatory measures to lower the current and maintain the voltage all the way to the ends of the lines. But in Delhi, this wasn’t happening. The result was a vicious cycle. Reactive loads increased the current, the higher current increased energy losses and lowered the voltages, lower voltages forced devices to draw more current and further increased the losses.

In some parts of Delhi, the effect was so severe that residents took matters into their own hands. A colleague of mine who lived in a different part of the city constantly experienced voltage that was too low for her appliances to operate reliably, so she had to install her own voltage stabilizer. At my home, we bought an inverter and battery system to keep a fan and a few lights running during the many outages.

Electricity Loss and Theft in Delhi

The losses in Delhi weren’t caused solely by technical problems. Theft of electricity was rampant, by both the powerful and the powerless (in both senses of the word). Businesses, residential customers, and utility employees with vested interests would siphon electricity from the grid. It was easy to illegally hook into a streetlight or a distribution line running close to one’s house or factory. Utilities didn’t have the resources to identify theft or penalize offenders. Even if they could, the courts were already overburdened, and an electricity regulatory commission that could push for reforms had not yet fully formed.

Updated meters have made billing easier and more accurate. Tata Power-DDL

Making matters worse, the utilities and their employees were rarely held accountable for their actions, and so corruption plagued the system. Junior engineers and line workers, many of them lacking appropriate technical skills, were tasked with handling nearly every issue, including outages, flickering, and bill payment. This was too much authority in the hands of people with too little training.

On top of that, customers didn’t pay their bills. Meters were old, frequently faulty, and easily tampered with. Utility employees would take a meter reading by visiting the customer’s property, noting the reading in a book, entering it in a ledger or on a computer back at the office, and converting it into an electricity bill that would get dropped off at the customer’s property. This process left a lot of room for incorrect billing.

To pay a bill, customers had to stand in long queues at the utility offices, which had limited business hours. Not wanting to take off a half day of work for this, many customers simply didn’t pay. And there was no penalty for not paying—there were no regulations allowing the utilities to cut off a customer’s power. (I paid my bill by having a family member stand in line for me.)

The combined commercial and technical losses left Delhi’s utilities collecting payment for less than half of the electricity they were supplying in the early 2000s.

India’s Electricity Act and Power Reforms

Such problems weren’t unique to Delhi. On average in 2002, state utilities across India experienced electricity losses of nearly 37 percent. My country desperately needed systemic reforms, but authority over electricity was split between the central and state governments so any decision-making was fractured. States managed most of the generation, as well as transmission and distribution, while the central government oversaw generation that supplied multiple states, such as hydropower, fossil fuel plants, and nuclear plants. The central government could push reforms, but the states determined whether those reforms would succeed. Making matters worse, most states put a single organization in charge of generation, transmission, and distribution, giving that entity too much control and reducing transparency and competition.

A team of technicians with BSES Rajdhani Power maintains an insulator string on a large power transformer in 2011. BSES Rajdhani Power

In 2001, India’s central government began writing some historic legislation that became the landmark Electricity Act, 2003. Among the grand reforms aimed at transforming the country’s power industry, it unbundled state oversight of grid networks, creating separate entities for generation, transmission, and distribution. It also opened up the power sector to privatization. It allowed large electricity customers to bypass local distribution companies and purchase electricity from competitors or build their own power plants. It created a central regulatory agency responsible for determining interstate tariffs and promoting market competition in the power sector. And it created mechanisms for prosecuting electricity theft.

Hundreds of capacitor banks have been installed in Delhi to supply reactive power at strategic locations and help stabilize voltage.Tata Power-DDL

In 2002, Delhi was already taking drastic action to fix its grid. The organization overseeing Delhi’s distribution, the Delhi Vidyut Board, was broken up and two private companies—BSES (now Reliance Infrastructure), and Tata Power—took over distribution. They faced a Herculean task. Tata Power, serving the northern half of Delhi, would have to tackle a combined commercial and technical electricity loss of 53.5 percent. BSES, whose territory was split between two subsidiaries, was facing 51.5 percent losses in South Delhi and 63.1 percent losses in East Delhi.

“The company inherited a deteriorated and overloaded network, massive power theft, weak billing and collection systems, inaccurate consumer records, and an aging, largely untrained workforce,” Dwijadas Basak, CEO of Tata Power, told me. There were over 100,000 unresolved billing complaints, 20,000 pending connection applications, and frequent supply failures, which had severely eroded consumer trust, he added. Both Tata and BSES devised sweeping reforms and human resource development initiatives. The companies followed their own paths over the years, but ultimately implemented similar changes, with similar results.

Delhi’s Electricity System Overhaul

Fixing Delhi’s grid was a journey that involved all stakeholders, including customers, city authorities, and utility employees at all levels. The utilities revamped their organizational structures, diminishing the power of junior staff and creating separate teams to focus on specific tasks. Long-term employees of the erstwhile Delhi Vidyut Board received training from the up-and-comers at the new companies.

On the technical side, both companies installed digital control systems that let them monitor and operate the grid from a central location. Known as SCADA, or supervisory control and data acquisition, the systems offered a bird’s-eye view of the infrastructure, including the status of equipment, voltage, current, power flow, and switch positions, with updates in seconds. This helped the companies identify areas of high loss and theft and make faster decisions based on accurate information.

The SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system at Balaji Estate in Delhi’s Kalkaji neighborhood serves as the nerve center of BSES Rajdhani Power’s distribution network in South and West Delhi. It enables real-time visibility, remote control of grid operations, fault identification and isolation, and load management. BSES Rajdhani Power

The utilities also replaced aging transformers and circuit breakers and created extensive maintenance plans for equipment. In 2002, 11 percent of the transformers in the region were failing at any given time. That rate is less than 1 percent today, according to Tata. Crucially, the companies installed hundreds of capacitor banks, including some mobile ones, to supply reactive power at strategic locations. This improvement reduced the total current flowing in the distribution lines and helped stabilize the voltage. They also installed voltage regulators at points in the system where voltage tends to drop.

To reduce theft, the companies replaced bare distribution wires with insulated lines—a single cable for three phases—which made it harder to tap into the lines. The cables also reduced outages because they’re better at preventing ground faults, which can occur when, say, a tree branch falls on the line.

Workers received better sensors and tools to do their jobs safely and accurately. For instance, they were given helmet-mounted voltage sensors, which are safer than handheld ones, and thermal scanning tools to detect hidden defects in the insulation of high-voltage equipment that could otherwise have led to catastrophic failures.

To reduce inaccurate billing and meter tampering, the companies replaced the old electromechanical meters with digital ones that are read with handheld devices. In some locations, radio-frequency-based group metering systems were installed by Tata to consolidate multiple customers’ meters into one. The data is then wirelessly transmitted to a central database, eliminating the need for individual meter readings. The companies are now trying smart meters, which give consumers more control over their electricity bills and give utilities remote control of some equipment (with the customer’s consent).

To encourage people to pay their bills, the utilities installed kiosks that are available 24 hours a day, and they created a web-based payment system and mobile app. Incentives for early bill payment and community-engagement programs also helped. Assistance from Delhi’s law enforcement considerably reduced electricity theft.

Tata Power hired women living in the 223 slums it serves in the northern parts of the city to knock on neighbors’ doors and remind them to pay their power bills. These payment collectors [left and center], known as abhas, were photographed while speaking with a customer [right] in the Sanjay Basti area of New Delhi in 2017. Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

In areas where theft was particularly rampant and losses were as high as 83 percent, according to Tata, the companies took a different strategy. These pockets of Delhi were predominantly occupied by low-income families. Tata Power, and later BSES, worked to improve the water supply for these residents and provide educational opportunities, such as instruction in reading and writing in Hindi as well as financial literacy. These efforts focused on the women, who were at home more, and paid them to collect electricity payments from their neighbors. Bill payment rates from these areas are now on par with those of other parts of Delhi.

In recent years, some customers have been installing rooftop solar panels to take advantage of subsidies and incentives. This trend can reduce electricity losses further because the energy generated at the customer end reduces current in the distribution lines. Customers are also installing more LED lights and energy-efficient appliances, reducing the load in the system.

BSES is using AI to help detect theft. The algorithms analyze consumption patterns in pockets where losses are higher than they should be. The company is also using AI to forecast demand, fine-tune operational efficiency, and provide chatbots for customers.

Quality of Life Improves in Delhi

Life in Delhi is better than it was 25 years ago. I’m not worried that the power may go out and force me to reschedule my activities. My uninterrupted Wi-Fi gives me peace of mind, and my heating and cooling systems keep me and my family comfortable. I rarely need to use our old inverter and battery.

The sharp rise of e-rickshaws in Delhi has increased demand on the power grid. Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images

The number of businesses in Delhi has increased substantially, in part because of the access to quality power. People can confidently buy products that depend on electricity. In fact, the city’s peak electricity demand has tripled since 2002 due to the increase in population, commercial activity, and use of electrical gadgets.

And then there’s the benefits to the planet. One unit of electricity that isn’t frittered away is one less unit that must be generated, not to mention the reductions in carbon emissions.

Still, there’s work to do. Some areas of Delhi continue to have high losses, driven partly by the illegal charging of e-rickshaws. Elsewhere in India, the states of Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Telangana still experience losses of about 17 to 23 percent despite the sweeping Electricity Act, 2003. There are many reasons for the ongoing losses: long distribution lines to remote villages, less digitization, and inefficiencies in billing and collection of payments.

These regions, and others around the world, can learn from Delhi’s grid comeback. Recently, power losses have increased substantially in countries such as Argentina, Greece, Jamaica, and Morocco, according to the World Bank, and some of the causes are similar to those that Delhi faced back in 2002.

Meanwhile, Australia, most countries in North America and Europe, and a few countries in Asia and Africa experience low electricity losses as they invest regularly in their distribution infrastructure and the ethical enforcement of rules. In China, for example, losses have gradually been cut in half, from 7.1 to 3.4 percent. In Latvia, losses plummeted from 25 to 5.8 percent.

What’s important is a comprehensive approach. Technologies like smart metering, AI, and analytics certainly help, but equally important is that people in the field are trained and take responsibility for their jobs, and that laws are enforced and payments collected.

“Sustainable loss reduction cannot happen through technology alone,” Abhishek Ranjan, CEO of BSES Rajdhani Power told me. “Technology is an important enabler, but long-term success comes from combining it with disciplined execution, operational accountability, and strong consumer engagement.”

Thousands of applications. Multiple rounds of review. Hundreds of hours spent evaluating startups from around the world. Now comes the part everyone has been waiting for.

Startup Battlefield 200 is almost here, and with today’s announcement, the judging panel is nearly complete. In just a couple of weeks, 200 carefully selected startups will gather at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to exhibit, meet investors, and compete for one of the most coveted opportunities in the startup world. Only a select group will advance to the live competition, where they’ll pitch in front of thousands of founders, investors, media, and customers and face questions from some of the sharpest minds in technology.

Today’s judges bring decades of experience building companies, backing founders, and spotting transformative ideas before they become obvious. They’ll help decide which startups continue their journey toward the Startup Battlefield finals and, ultimately, who has a chance to lift this year’s trophy. If you want to see tomorrow’s industry leaders before the rest of the world does, there’s no better place to be than TechCrunch Disrupt.

The only way to be front and center at the Disrupt Stage and witness the ultimate pitch competition of the year is to register for TechCrunch Disrupt. Grab your pass and bring your co-founder, partner, or peer for 50% off. Bringing a community of four or more? Save up to 30% on passes.

Meet the next wave of Startup Battlefield judges

Get to know all 20 judges revealed so far by visiting the Disrupt agenda. Stay tuned for the final announcement, where we’ll unveil the five judges who will evaluate the finalists and determine who takes home the $100,000 equity-free prize and coveted Disrupt Cup.

Caleb Appleton, Partner, Bison Ventures

Caleb Appleton is a partner at Bison Ventures, where he invests in physical AI across techbio, robotics, and real-world intelligence. A biomedical engineer by training, his investments include Cobot, Vivodyne, Passkey, Sleuth, Inner Logic, Cosmon, and Grid Aero. Previously, Appleton invested in frontier technologies at Innovation Endeavors and spent several years as an operator at TuneIn, giving him experience spanning early-stage science, venture investing, and scaling a technology business.

Sara Deshpande, General Partner, Maven Ventures

Sara Deshpande is a general partner at Maven Ventures, where she invests in seed-stage companies built around emerging consumer behaviors and trends. She focuses on consumer software spanning digital health and consumer applications of AI. Deshpande joined Maven as its first employee in 2014 and has spent a decade in venture capital. She received her MBA from Stanford, where she now teaches a course on startups and entrepreneurship.

Aatish Nayak, Partner, Kleiner Perkins

Aatish Nayak joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner in May 2026, where he focuses on partnering with AI native founders with deep vertical expertise across all domains.
 
Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Narak was the first PM and VP of Product at Harvey, where he helped build the early product, design, marketing, analytics, and support teams. Before that, he was an early product leader at Scale AI working on data infrastructure for ecommerce, early NLP (GPT-2), and autonomous vehicles. And before that, he was at Shield AI working on the core knowledge stack for robotic defense systems that save lives.
 
Jason Risch, Partner, Greylock

Jason Risch is a partner at Greylock, where he invests in enterprise security, AI and ML infrastructure, data platforms, and developer tools. His portfolio includes Onehouse, a cloud-native managed lakehouse platform, and Baseten, an ML model serving toolkit for data science teams. Before joining Greylock, Risch worked in business operations at Opendoor, as a management consultant at McKinsey’s Bay Area practice, and as a startup builder at the AI Fund. He studied Mathematical and Computational Science at Stanford University.

Mark Xu, Partner, Index Ventures

Mark Xu is a partner at Index Ventures, where he invests across stages in cybersecurity, infrastructure, and AI. He has backed companies building at the frontier of AI, including Fireworks, Parallel, 7AI, Simile, and Flapping Airplanes, and previously worked as a growth investor at Lightspeed, supporting companies including Wiz, Glean, and Grafana. Xu looks for deeply technical founders who combine domain expertise with hustle and an obsession with their customers.

Grab your Disrupt pass and don’t miss Startup Battlefield

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is happening October 13-15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, bringing 10,000+ tech leaders, VCs, and founders together to meet the next generation of breakout startups, connect with leaders who could change their startup’s trajectory, and get a front-row seat to where the industry is headed.

Register now to save up to $100 before Disrupt doors open, and bring your co-founder, colleague, or peer with a second pass for 50% off. Experience all that Disrupt has to offer together, from six industry stages, roundtables, and breakout sessions to the startups and connections shaping what’s next in tech.

Arlington, Virginia-based startup Quartermaster in May closed a $43 million Series A around its idea of using weather-hardened sensors to capture data and generate insights about maritime activity. That idea has proven popular, because Quartermaster has already closed a much larger Series B, bringing in $140 million this time.

Founder and CEO Neil Sobin said the round was preempted by software-focused venture firm Insight Partners, and the interest in what Quartermaster is building was helped by the war in Iran and the shipping chaos it’s caused.

“I think we we’ve gained huge amounts of conviction in the core thesis,” Sobin said in an exclusive interview. “A big part of the story for us this year was, events in the world drive that clarity and drive that conviction and urgency, and when you see that, you gotta seize the opportunity.”

About $100 million of the Series B came from Insight and new investor, defense-focused firm Overmatch Ventures, as well as existing backers like First Round Capital. The remaining $40 million came in the form of a debt facility from investment bank Stifel.

“Quartermaster is building a distributed network for the ocean, where reliable, real-time data has been difficult to come by,” Nick Sinai, managing director at Insight Partners, said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The team’s execution and the strong demand for maritime data and awareness made this an investment we wanted to lead, and we’re proud to back Neil and the team as they scale to meet the opportunity with commercial fleets.”

Quartermaster’s hardware, which it calls “SmartMast,” is a fairly straightforward setup. The startup integrates cameras and radios into a package that’s mounted on a ship’s mast, and can capture and relay real-time maritime data. This allows governments, shipping companies and insurance providers to know far more than the current standard of AIS, or the “automatic identification system,” which is more or less just a series of location pings.

This real-time awareness data creates all kinds of opportunities for what Quartermaster calls the “largest blind spot on Earth.” Everything from helping ships avoid collisions, to better understanding congestion in shipping lanes, to rescuing lost mariners is on the table. Sobin said each SmartMast records tens of gigabytes per day, and the startup and its customers are still finding new uses for the data being captured.

“There isn’t a lot of prior art in maritime AI, and so it’s been exciting to, one, have our own source of data,” he said. “But two, there’s just so much low hanging fruit that we’ve been knocking down this summer in what you can start to build and then deliver value for our customers on.”

Sobin said the startup spends a lot of time engaging with people across the maritime industry — and not just vessel owners and operators — in order to find out what they want out of this technology.

“This is an ignored field. Mariners around the world have been ignored by technology for a really long time, and so when they meet us, they’re so excited, because they’re like: ‘Oh, I have so many ideas, let’s work on them’,” he said.

More than 650 vessels are now equipped with SmartMast in 25 countries, Sobin said, and the startup has shipped over 800 to customers. That gap is largely driven by the fact that Quartermaster is about to start deploying the SmartMast system to entire fleets, a sign that early adopters are really buying into the idea.

Quartermaster has had to hustle to keep up with demand, Sobin said. The startup has doubled its manufacturing capacity and continues to tweak its design so its hardware can be manufactured at a quicker clip.

“We know we can do this, and we are seeing a lot of proof that tells us we’re really onto something massive and important in the world,” Sobin said. “So, what do you do when you have that position? You run faster and you move faster and you double down on that strategy.”