Fifth Column

India Today, December 21, 1998
Dec 28, 1998

FIFTH COLUMN
Fire Tamasha

Compulsive agitators should make electricity their cause.

Tavleen Singh

Organised labour and organised thugs have voices so loud in our country that they invariably manage to get heard over everyone else. Barely has one lot finished yelling and screaming about something than the others start. So the entire nation has been swept along in the past couple of weeks by organised labour's fury over the possible privatisation of the insurance sector and by the Shiv Sena's fury over Fire. The first lot called a nation-wide strike to draw attention to itself. The second forced cinemas to close because it didn't like a movie.

Our tragedy is that on account of being forced to pay constant attention to this kind of tamasha we have little time to concentrate on infinitely more important issues -- like the fact that India could face "darkness" in the foreseeable future unless we can get consumers to pay for electricity. The expression is not mine but that of Power Minister Rangarajan Kumaramangalam: "We will have had it unless we do something. You will have darkness."

If his grim prediction comes true then India will quite simply not be entering the 21st century except in a chronological sense. That century, now barely a year away, is going to see the flowering of the information age; and there can be no information age without that most important of prerequisites: power. But the power minister, despite being one of the BJP Government's more intelligent and articulate products, remains a voice in the wilderness. His attempts to point out that the problem has to be dealt with urgently usually get ignored. Instead populist, irresponsible chief ministers try to buy rural votes by providing free power to farmers.

Farmers are not the only ones who pay less than they should, if they pay at all. You and me do the same. The power minister points out that on every additional megawatt the state produces it loses Rs 50 lakh a year -- because it costs Rs 2 per unit to supply power for which we pay Rs 1.40, if we pay at all.

We require an additional 80,000 MW of power by the year 2010 given our present rate of five per cent annual economic growth. This will cost approximately Rs 3 crore per megawatt. Even if we find the money to pay for this additional 80,000 MW, India will continue to be among the world's lowest users of power. Seventy per cent of rural homes remain without electricity. Even people in our cities and towns complain of chronic power shortage.

Without getting into Power Ministry jargon it is easy to understand how little power the average Indian consumes when you consider that the average Chinese consumes twice as much. Even Pakistanis consume more than us.

There are people in our country (dare I mention her name without being inundated with another torrent of abuse) like Medha Patkar who believe that using too much power is a bad thing. She and her pals spend their lives preventing power plants from coming up on the specious grounds that Indians do not need much power and that on the whole the use of electricity is some kind of "elitist" plot. This is not just rubbish, as I have pointed out before in this column, it is dangerous rubbish.

What is elitist is the fact that we have followed power policies which seemed geared entirely towards our cities and towns. In an age in which information comes from computers and television screens, what our skewed power policies have done is create a new caste system. In this system the Harijans are those who do not have access to the single most important thing that makes computers and televisions possible: power.

This has happened mainly because of policy makers too believing that power is something only rich businessmen need. As a result, the power sector has been so neglected that a power plant takes twice as long -- and sometimes longer -- to be built in India than elsewhere.

In most countries it takes no more than five years to build a hydel plant. In India it can take three times as long. Not just because of outdated procedures and bad policies but also because of pressure from lobbies of the Patkar variety. Thermal power plants face similar problems. The end result is crores and crores of rupees wasted on delays in a country that can barely afford to pay for power plants.

Among the solutions Kumaramangalam is offering is the privatisation of power distribution. He believes this should have been done even before we got into privatised production because this could be the only way to save the vast quantities of power that are simply stolen on the way to being distributed. To do any of these things though we need a government that can spend some time working instead of putting out fires -- fires started more often than not for the silliest reasons.

Does it really matter, for instance, whether Fire deals with lesbianism? If the Shiv Sena doesn't like lesbians it can quite simply avoid seeing the film. The chief minister of Maharashtra would do much better to spend some time examining whether his Government can afford to provide the free power that his master, Bal Thackeray, so generously offers people at his public meetings. Our politicians need to wake up to how desperately the average Indian wants regular, efficient power supply.

If Delhi voted overwhelmingly against the BJP in the recent state elections one reason was memories of a summer when almost the entire city spent night after night in darkness and day after day sweltering in the heat. In the villages as well bijli is usually an election issue. But is there anyone who can listen above the din of our organised voices?

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