Kerala Electrical Inspectorate’s Technical Diary

All fresh electrical engineers attending job interviews, or experienced engineers faced with a requirement of planning a new electrical installation, are faced with a challenge to be aware of and follow the existing rules and regulations put in place by statutory authorities. Designers will be familiar with these rules, but who are in maintenance, service, or marketing may be totally oblivious even to the existence of them. I have seen people who are otherwise very good maintenance engineers stumble when asked to design a new system as an addition or augmentation of their existing facilities. The issue becomes formidable as the company is required to obtain license from a competent authority for the addition. What is to be done in this case? If you work for a big corporation that has multiple wings and design departments and/or consultants to do this work, you may be free from this burden, but still, you are expected to review their design and comment on it. Designers will be somewhat comfortable with a little overrating of the equipments, but as the man to pay for the additional capacity, it is your job to ask them to cut down on their liberal design in order to reduce the amount you actually end up paying. In order to do this, awareness of the rules and regulations is mandatory.

The technical diary brought out by the Kerala Electrical Inspectorate Engineers’ Welfare Society is an excellent document. It brings out a slew of tables, check lists, rules of thumb and extracts from relevant rules pertaining to most of the installations we can think of. Unfortunately, this diary is not for sale and is normally issued only to its members and complimentary copies released to its patrons. Recently, I got hold of a copy of 2012 diary and I think it will be really nice to share it here for all. Since the data runs into many tens of pages, it will take some time for me to come out with a searchable soft copy of the entire content. So, the tables will be published one by one. The rules and regulations stipulated here will be applicable everywhere in India with minor changes enforced by various states.

This post contains an index and update of the tables issued so far.

Serial Number	Subject	Release date
1	Basic Electrical Laws	2016 Sep 29
2	The Electricity Act, 2003	2016 Sep 30
3	Important Provisionsin the Electricity Act 2003 & CEA Regulations 2010	2016 Oct 01