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Sharad Joshi

The Union Power Minister, Mr Suresh Prabhu, is certainly one of the more aware ministers. A young successful politician with a brilliant academic background and experience of the finance portfolio in a State like Maharashtra, he holds fairly rational views on a number of subjects and, therefore, stands out like a healthy thumb in the sore NDA Cabinet full of saffron mumbo-jumbo and supremacy of Indian systems, in general, and Vedic sciences, in particular.

India veered to the path of liberalisation abandoning the socialistic pattern mainly because of the miserable plight of the economic and the social infrastructure, particularly the area of electric power.

In the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had pronounced that social ownership of industry and electricity would produce socialism. The followers of the Soviet pattern in India failed more miserably than their Russian intellectual mentors, and the power sector has been a shambles for over two decades.

It is indeed lucky that we have somebody like Mr Prabhu in charge of the power portfolio. Mr Prabhu believes in putting his hands to the wheel and also keeps in touch with the knowledgeable and the common to keep them informed of what he is trying to do. In the very first week of the New Year, Mr Prabhu addressed a letter to thousands of people in the country to apprise them of the seriousness of the power situation, as what he proposes to do about it. In it, he also solicits advice and inputs from all who may care to give them.

Since Independence, the country's power generating capacity has grown by about 100,000 MW along with the associated transmission and distribution network. The consumer coverage has grown exponentially. Yet, underlines Mr Prabhu, we have not been able to contain energy shortages, ensure quality power and make the sector self-sustainable. On the supply side, the generation capacity is inadequate, not fully utilised, high voltage transmission lines are limited and technological and commercial losses are sizeable. On the demand side, conservation of energy and efficiency in usage are the focus areas.

What is the Minister going to do about it? Power is a concurrent subject: 60 per cent of the generating capacity, 70 per cent of the transmission network and the entire distribution system are controlled by the States. A pivotal role is required to be played by the State electricity boards that are unfortunately uniformly on the brink of financial collapse. The Power Minister has prepared an impeccable blueprint that envisages a six-level intervention strategy. Clearly, Mr Prabhu is all set to clear the Augean stables of the power sector through governmental activism at the national, State, SEB, distribution circle, feeder and consumer levels. Lest one feels this is yet another governmental paper-horse, Mr Prabhu has set up a monitoring mechanism and assures us that considerable progress has been made in augmenting the generating capacity, encouraging private investment, distributional reforms through grid discipline and all.

Further, a Power Project Monitoring Committee has been set up to monitor and produce a report for the immediate attention of the Minister.

Discussions are on with the Planning Commission for allocation of funds. Sixty-three circles are to be developed as centres of excellence for distribution reform.

States have been asked to form district-level committees for distribution and generation resource planning and to prepare detailed project reports for the identified circles.

Mr Prabhu's letter contains a tediously longish list of similar initiatives on the part of the young Minister. I wish the Ministry of Power all success, but have a feeling that even by 2012, by which time Mr Prabhu expects everything in the power sector to be hunky and dory, little would have changed and power will continue to be a stumbling block for the economy.

The failure will be largely because Mr Prabhu expects governmental interventions to bring about reform, sanity and efficiency in the sector. Nothing in the past record justifies this simple faith. The power sector has suffered largely because of the rigid state control and is in need of de-statisation rather than incremental state intervention.

Mr Prabhu is treading the path of the Minister of Agriculture who continues to pin faith in the effectiveness of the state as the prime mover of development. Mr Prabhu would be better advised to follow the model of the communications sector. Power is supplied through cables, so are telecommunication services. Surprisingly, the situation of the two services is diametrically opposite. The telecommunication services in India were a shambles 20 years ago. New technology was blocked. It took years to get a telephone connection and hours to put through a trunk call.

All this has changed dramatically and rapidly. The whole nation is dotted with private STD and ISD booths, the waiting time for a phone connection is down to a few days. STD, ISD and Internet facilities have become remarkably good. Large number of customers are toting cell phones and a customer asking for one line is being offered two.

What accounts for the difference in the rapid progress of the telecommunications and the continued stalemate of power sector? The answer simply is openness. The DoT was split into private sector corporations and the field was opened up for the state-of-the-art technology and private investment.

In the power sector, on the other hand, doors are cautiously being opened for private investment under strict control of the very people who were responsible for the power imbroglio.

The authorities in the power sector recognised long back the need and superiority of the private enterprise but insisted on having the private initiative under the scrutiny of the public sector, the original sinner.

The power people persist in the doctrine of paramountcy of the state sector and, rather than opening it for private investment under free market conditions, are trying to canalise it through state monitoring. The power sector can yet be transformed almost overnight in a miraculous metamorphosis if only the Prime Minister could get somebody like Sam Pitroda, as Rajiv Gandhi did.

(The author is founder, Shetkari Sanghatana. Feedback can be sent to sharad@mah.nic.in)

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