Finding the gains of proportional plus integral (PI) controller for the control of distribution static compensator by conventional methods is a very laborious and time consuming task. Moreover, the optimum solution may get trapped into the local minima. This paper presents a new algorithm based on the foraging behavior of E.coli Bacteria in human intestine, to optimize the coefficients of PI controller. Through the simulation results, it is observed that the dynamic response of bacterial foraging PI (BF-PI) controller is quite satisfactory. The proposed BF technique is compared with genetic algorithm (GA). The BF technique converges faster than GA to get the global optimum solution.