On the Spot
Tavleen Singh
When the lights went off across half of India last week the first person I thought of was the late Rangarajan Kumaramangalam. This was because he warned me about something like this happening more than a decade ago. He said in so many words that unless power production and reforms in the power sector were addressed with the utmost urgency we would face ‘darkness at noon’. This conversation took place when he had just become Power Minister in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government. I remember that I had stopped by his office for a chat and a cup of good South Indian coffee and found the new minister in darkest gloom. When I asked why he seemed so out of sorts he said it was because he was overwhelmed by the impossibility of doing his new job well. He said that India’s power needs were increasing so rapidly and supplies being built so slowly that he was certain that there would be ‘darkness at noon’ in the near future.
If Ranga had not died, tragically too young, he would have been alive to see his prediction come true twice last week. First, the northern grid collapsed leaving most of north India in darkness for a whole day and barely had we digested the shock of this when the northern and eastern grids collapsed leaving more than 600 million people in darkness for several hours. The news made headlines across the world adding to India’s currently poor economic image. This is without mentioning irreparable damage to the economy as trains stopped dead in their tracks, metro services in Delhi ground to a halt and airports relied on generators to stay half alive.
The Power Minister, who has now been promoted to the Home Ministry, had no explanation to offer other than to accuse states like Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab for taking more power from the grid than they were legally allowed to. The Minister missed the point and sadly so did most of the reporters who interviewed him.
The question they should have asked is why there was not enough power in the first place. Had they asked this question they would have discovered that the Ministry of Power routinely fails to meet its production targets and in the past three years there has been a shortage of 12% at peak hours. Why? The answer to that would lead us straight to the Ministry of Environment which, since the days when Jairam Ramesh used it to project himself as a passionate environmentalist by banning things left right and centre, has blocked coal production. More than half of India’s power is produced by coal based plants and for months now there have been reports that they have been functioning at less than their full capacity and sometimes not at all.
The new Minister of Environment, Shrimati Jayanthi Natarajan, should have taken urgent steps to restart the projects that her predecessor stopped but she has done nothing. So his peculiar policy for coal production that involved something he called ‘go and no-go areas’ continues. Would it not be wiser for the Environment Ministry to make a clear set of regulations rather than take decisions in such arbitrary fashion?
It is not possible to mine coal without causing some environmental damage but the way to deal with this is to put in place clear instructions for reforesting and reversal of the damage. This is what happens in countries that deal with these things in a more sensible manner than India has. Our Environment Ministry not only takes decisions that are dangerously arbitrary but collapses in the face of any agitation by environmental activists who often have the most dubious credentials. So nuclear facilities have been put on hold because of agitations by anti-nuclear activists and hydroelectric facilities by a whole panoply of activists including those who want to prevent dams on our rivers for religious reasons. In the process even dams that do not prevent rivers from flowing have been stopped.
The problem is that electricity does not come from two holes in a wall as some people may believe and there is no way yet that it can come in adeaute quantities from such sources as the sun and the wind. Until these alternatives sources are better developed it will have to continue to be produced in more traditional ways. What is more important is to find ways to prevent losses in transmission which are estimated to exceed 30% of production and to find ways to charge consumers like farmers who, for political reasons, are usually exempt from paying even the smallest amount for the electricity they consume.
In Gujarat Narendra Modi has shown how this can be done. His government has set up a parallel system of distribution that allows those farmers who wish to get guaranteed supplies to pay for their electricity. Those who still want free electricity can continue to use the old grid which provides supplies that are not so reliable. Why should something similar not be attempted in big agricultural states like Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh? In most Indian states electricity distribution remains in the hands of the government and this allows politicians to build their vote banks by giving farmers ‘free’ electricity. Losses made from this practice are estimated to be $36 billion.
When I put this figure on Twitter I was inundated by angry tweets from lefties who said that industry was given electricity at heavily subsidized rates and so were urban consumers. Yes, but at least they pay some bills every month. And, perhaps it is time to re-examine whether we can afford to continue subsidizing electricity at all. Perhaps, it is time to make drastic changes in an energy policy that appears to be leading us closer and closer to Ranga’s prediction of ‘darkness at noon’.
When the former Power Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, was confronted with the first grid collapse on Monday he pointed out proudly that we should remember that it had been at least a decade since such a thing had happened. What he did not admit was that in all Indian cities, towns and villages there are power cuts on a daily basis somewhere or other. This should not happen in a country that aspires to become an economic superpower. It would not happen if more attention had been paid to the seriousness of India’s energy crisis. So in a way we should be grateful for the darkness that descended across half of India last week because it could act like a kick in the backside of our political class.
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