While officially announcing the milestone, Minister for Power and Renewable Energy, Piyush Goyal, said: "Over the next few years, India will see a five-fold increase in the electricity demand. A scheme like DELP is an example of India's commitment to ensuring energy access and its continued efforts towards combatting climate change. EESL's achievement of distributing over three crore bulbs is commendable. I urge more citizens to come forward, join the #iLEDtheway movement and contribute to the government's vision of an energy efficient India."

Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Ajay Mathur, Director General, Bureau of Energy Efficiency, said, "To meet the energy needs of our future, we need to increase electricity generation by at least six times. Energy efficiency will play a key role in this task, as the cost of saving energy is only one-third of the cost of generating it. The three-crore milestone is very significant and EESL has done a great job in achieving it in such a short span of time."

India has made an international commitment to reduce its carbon emission intensity by 30-35%. Building capacities while adopting and deploying new energy efficient technology, and other technologies to reduce carbon emissions is one of the mitigation strategies that India has.

Saurabh Kumar, Managing Director, EESL, said: "This achievement is evident of the fact that as a nation we are open to adopting and deploying new energy efficient technology and of our seriousness towards achieving energy efficiency. We are currently distributing more than 15 lakh LEDs every week and this number will only go up. We hope to touch the five-crore milestone soon."

The target of the DELP is to replace all the 77 crore incandescent bulbs sold in India with LED bulbs. This will result in reduction of 20,000 MW load, energy savings of 105 billion KWh and Green House Gas (GHG) emissions savings of 80 million tons every year. The annual saving in electricity bills of consumers will be Rs. 40,000 crore, considering an average tariff of Rs. 4 per kWh.
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