India is moving on the path of rapid growth and restructuring with ever changing regulatory environment. There is a direct impact of this changing structure of power sector on system operation. New roles and responsibilities have to be taken up involving co-ordination with various external utilities. Standards based integration of systems and applications has become imperative. This paper provides an up-to-date report on the various initiatives and standardization activities in Indian Power Sector. The objective of the paper is to present the requirement and scope of standardization from the perspective of regional load despatch center (RLDC). Various applications used by RLDC and their data exchanges to perform its functions are described. A set of application usecases are then developed which document the data exchange requirements. Development of these usecases is the first step in adoption of common information model (CIM) and identification of necessary CIM extensions suitable for Indian scenario. © 2011 IEEE.