BLANK traffic lights, mayhem on the roads, trains at a standstill, water-treatment plants lying inert, coal miners trapped underground. India has felt like the giant set of a disaster movie since Sunday night, when a series of power cuts began to strike the north of the country, including the capital, Delhi. Territory inhabited by at least 600m people has been hit. Back-up generators have kept airports and many offices open, but power supply from the grid is still sporadic, despite the efforts of the authorities.
Although the south of the country, including Mumbai, the commercial hub, is so far unaffected, the power cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. India faces a slowing economy, a lame-duck government and a drought in parts of the country. The blackout seems to have been selected by a malign God to exhibit yet another glaring vulnerability: rotten infrastructure. The technical fault appears to lie in the national transmission grid that links together the local electricity networks. Officials have suggested it may have been “tripped” by a surge in demand for power. But in truth India’s power sector has been a disaster waiting to happen after years of neglect.
As our briefing earlier this year shows, the entire supply chain is troubled. Not enough coal is being dug up by the state monopolist, Coal India. As a result, generating companies, which own power stations, face the prospect of buying expensive imported coal, with ruinous consequences for their finances. Many are in danger of going bust. As this week’s cuts have shown, the national transmission system that shifts power around the country needs modernisation and investment—some $110 billion according to a McKinsey study. And finally the “last mile” local distribution companies, usually state-owned and which deliver power to homes and businesses, are all but bankrupt. Their tariffs are held artificially low by politicians more keen to win votes than balance the books. They have also chronically underinvested.
Reform would probably entail breaking up Coal India, inviting in private-sector mining companies, privatising the local distribution firms and giving regulators more teeth. But since the early 1990s India’s politicians have ducked the challenge, and been unwilling to tackle vested interests or make difficult decisions. It would be nice to think that when the lights come back on this time they might act with more urgency. But unlike in the movies, disasters in India don’t necessarily have happy endings.
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Energy theft is part but not the main cause of the problem. A global statistics shows that India has a much worser situation than Philipines: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outa.... Bad government regulation, bad company administration, lack of investment and demagogic energy prices are more likely causes. This is so in Brazil, California, India or anywhere else. Now there is an additional excuse for delaying decisions: environmental and human rights concerns. This is so at least in Brazil, with the Belo Monte project being rightfully criticized. In China there are no similar criticisms of the Three Gorges project.
Regards from Brazil
I suspect this power failure, like many similar power system breakdowns in third-world countries, is due to attempts at illegal connection to the grid by unauthorized persons for the purpose of theft. Yes, the answer, plain and simple, is the stealing of electricity, or "leakage", usually done at the 'last mile' local distribution hub level.
Obviously, in India, it must be an uncomplicated and easy task to ilicitly acquire electricity, as their rate of loss due to leakages was the second highest in the world for 2005. According to the Economist (print edition), 33% of all electricity produced in India for that year resulted in 'leakage'. Incidentally, the top notcher was the Philippines at 40%, which explains the regular outages there. For comparison, the chart included China, which came in at 4%.
While it's true that 'leakage' also results from long distance transmission 'line drops', it can't possibly be more than a fraction of that 33% and 40% rate of diminishment, respectively.
Evidently, Indians have an aversion towards paying for utilities, and would rather blame their misery on the power companies, and more conveniently, their inept government.
A nice example on why governments do not belong in business. Politicians are incompetent and when the over regulate and form monopolies all it does is empower politicians to be even more corrupt and at the expense of the people they govern. Get the government out of power production and free up some capitalism and you will not see these problems again. Why, because in a free society, with a people free from government and capitalism used as an economic system(not a political one) the power of the consumer will cause power companies to do it right or go bankrupt as consumers move their money to business who do perform well at a good price. Let government create monopolies and put themselves in charge, you get over priced and under performing services and because the government owns in, the consumer has no power to go anywhere else. Politicians never shut down anything not working and they have every incentive to line their own pockets with the money at the expense of service.
If India wants to never suffer such extreme calamities, they need to tell their government to get the hell out of the way, end the government monopoly over power and let businesses and consumers interact as the normally would. All Government is there for is to make sure those business are not committing fraud or doing something crazy like polluting a river and perhaps setting up some standards like how many volts a home should have. That is about it. Anything else, is just government in control of what it should not be owning and mismanaging it while they pillage peoples money to pay for incompetence.
Right now, I will say that the priority should be more population control measures rather than getting more power to consumers. Crop failures due to the late monsoon this year will show up eventually to the power dudes how fragile is the situation now to feed the vast growing population.
Happyfish18, India should do anything but copy what China does for population control!!!
And you should suggest your American people produce babies like the Ultra Orthodox Jewish people.
Happyfish
I respect your genuine reply - But you must have, by now, realised the extreme dangers of population control.
If you have not - Just look at Japan and project into Japan's future.
And then let me tell you - most of the present policies in the West seem to be result of the lessons learnt from 'The lost decade in Japan'
In fact - the West seems to be destined to got through those lessons themselves.
Looking at the powerless situation more objectively, the power dudes sitting in New Delhi may have save the World by not sending out the greenhouse gases.
India is blessed with lots of Sunshine. The government should incentivize using solar panels instead of coal buring power stations as the source of electricity.
Solar panels are widely used in Tibet, where sunshine is not even as abundant as in India.
"a malign God"
Are your editors on vacation, or do you intend to offend half the planet who believe there is one God.
Years ago you could have written the devil, but it seems he is a taboo subject.
Way to hit on the important points...
It is beyond debate that India's physical infrastruture is pathetic. This is hurting India in seen and unseen ways.
Unreliable power supply has made people to go for millions of diesel-run gensets of various sizes; some are big enough to take care of the entire power needs of gated communities of the well-to-do families with hundreds of apartments. For a oil-short country, it means heavy trade deficit. Lack of proper foodgrain storage leads to high wastages, depresses prices the farmer gets and gives opportunity to traders to squeeze the farmers and the consumers.
Unfortunately, it is not just letting the private sector in. Private sector has been a major violator of safety, environment and labour laws. There is inadequate financial resources of most private sector aspirants. Recent troubles about land acquistion, forest or tribal land use, effluent discharge and political plays including resisting price changes put huge question-marks on whether India in fact can resolve this infrastructure bottleneck.
Regarding the name of the column, the Buddha did not receive enlightenment under the Banyan tree. It was a Sacred Fig Tree (Ficus religiosa) also known as the Bodhi tree. Please see Wikipedia under Bodhi tree for more info.
80% of Indians live in the rural areas and are not connected to any power grid and doesn't have electricity. Live goes on as normal whether there is a power blackout or not. The inadequate infrastructure in India doesn't affect the majority of Indians who are more concerned with their daily survival and the late arrival of the monsoons.
Jai Hinduja. If with a bit more population controls in place, I don't see why people should not learn from the 80% Indians to live sustainably without destroying the world.
Imagine 1,000,000,000 (one billion) Indians without electricity. That would have sounded incredulous just a few days ago, but it doesn't now.
It took USA 4 days to restore power in 2003 blackout, India did it in 6 hours!!! But that does not absolve the power ministry in India. Inefficiency and corruption cannot be tolerated.
Best wishes, Kishore Nair from Mumbai
The average total US electrical outage in minutes per year is about 140. (source MIT 2011 report).
My experience in India is that if you have less than 140 minutes electrical outage per week you are doing well.
So honestly your comparison is a bit pointless. As the article noted India has been a disaster waiting to happen and it won't get better in the short term.
Except for some parts of the metros, if you have less than 140 minutes electrical outrage per day you are doing very well.
Could this disaster act as a wake up call? Let`s hope so. India needs to review it`s development policy across the board and create a more friendly environment for investment in all vital sectors, energy being one of them. Without sustained supply of energy , sustaining growth will become more and more difficult. The sooner politicians understand this simple fact and act upon it the better for the country.
Since Independence the Politicians of India (does not matter which party) have looted and raped the country. The reason the corrupt and the illiterate and the criminals want to become politicians is because they have realised this is the best profession in a country where the rules of law (legislation) is ineffective, the courts powerless (underpaid, under invested in and governed by judicial system that was built for the early 1900's) and as a result they can get away by doing anything because they control the bureaucrats who control the cops.
Chronic under investment in Infrastructure (Power is just one of them) is a given. But whatever little is sanctioned for investment is wasted by incompetence, corruption and delays. All under the guise of rules and regulations. The only 2 educated ministers in this Indian Govt (Manmohan Singh and Chidambram) are now ineffectual and virtually "given up" with the incompetence and corruption surrounding them. I don't think its just the Congress Party. What scares me is its all of them.
Until you excise this cancer of corruption and incompetence, I do not see a future for this country. All the growth that has happened in the past 15 years is due to the freeing of the private sector and the entrepreneurial spirit of the average Indian to survive in a country where everything conspires against you.
Well, if India a demand supply mismatch then first of all it should do away with the populist free power for farmers thing...
Trust India's red tape and corruption to botch up everything... about 4 years back when UMPP projects were started India was expected to go power surplus by 2015... and their inability to secure long term coal supplies has just made those projects unviable.
As someone who is heavily invested in Asia in my professional career, it is sad to see the experiment that is India continually making management errors because of politics. This problem is in all countries but the hopeful part of me continues to wish for a bright future for India. Let us hope that the politicians (or at least the voters) can learn from this and get some change to happen.
Short but excellent post.
India's political parties, particularly, the one which has been in power for over half-a-century, have shown no intelligence or vision.
Those reasons lie behind 'management errors'.
Sadly, the matter does not end there. These political parties have sought to win elections through 'divide and rule'.
Indians often accuse the British colonial Raj of 'divede and rule'. BUT even a cursory study of the electoral strategy of India's politicians shows how well they 'divide and rule'.
Undermining of India's democratic institutions, its civil society and her Constitution is helped by a thick-headed media.
It is a miracle India still manages to produce a healthy 6.5% growth rate - most of it due to the private sector, much better managed than the government of India.
We all wish for a bright future for India and its people.
The problem is not india’s politicians, not corruption, not its democratic institutions, not its civil society of the minority elites, and certainly not its Constitution. they are all fine and dandy and well within the norm of developing economies.
the core problems of india all trace their roots to the cynical yet seemingly harmless hindu caste culture that is out of date and out of humanity. to be sure, almost all civilisations had had institutionalised caste systems of one kind or another, but they moved on as wheel of history advances to higher enlightenment, except for india.
how can anybody expect a country to succeed when it is still enslaved with this massive human bondage of hereditary inequality, yet its english touting upper caste elites still think nothing of it? india as a single nation has had close to 70 years to prove that such caste mentality won't work.
that’s the issue and that’s the problem.
interesting. what is the hindu caste culture problem? tell us more.
The problem in this scenario might be caste, but not for the reasons you might think. The minister who oversaw this disaster, believe it or not, was a dalit (untouchable). India already provides probably the most generous affirmative action in the world, but thus pays a steep price in competence.
Democracy has meant a shift in power to the lower castes, who comprise the majority of India, and vote—unbeknownst to them—against their own interests economically. If anyone is shackling them at this point, it is themselves.
Being an Indian,I dont feel writing bad for my country BUT u can NOT Hide truth...Indian Power industry is craving for reforms...I dont what more signals top brass of Indian power sector wants??
Even after 2 incidents, d situation looks very critical...I dont wish it happens d 3rd time.....Lots and lots of talks...now its time for some rapid action.....
Reason for grid failure this time will probably be incompetience of grid operator.. it was not due to power shortage.. indeed grid had excess power at that time and grid operator should have asked power generators to back down, which didnt happen.. that can only explain grid failing at 1 am..
and lets not come up with ideas of breaking india as a solution.. it is the only country with so much diversity to stay together.. guys lets not be so pessimistic.. there are problems and there are solutions.. lets work on finding solutions..
I think author hinted at breaking Coal India and NOT India as a possible solution.
Breaking India would be rather drastic... even the Economist wouldn't suggest that :)
I wouldn't say it cam at a worse time. I believe it came at a perfect time. the whole world is either slowing down or in a recession and this would be a perfect way for India to get consultants from other countries and try to upgrade their energy infrastructures. Also a good time for the green community to go in and propose alternitive energy solutions.
It's time India moved away from the stupid concept of a monstrous transmission grid hauling power over thousands of kilometers from remote generating stations at one end to a bunch of consumers at the other end especially the urban centers and the agriculture farms,suffering over 35% losses of various types in the process.Further the grids in various regions from the North to the North East to the East and to the West are interconnected,so delicately balanced and made smarter as well that any small disturbance anywhere to this monster can lead to its imminent collapse.
Surely,all urban centers and agricultural farms could have been islanded and isolated from the grid using distributed generation,micro-grids,DC grids,DC equipment and solar pumps with solar/wind as the reliable local generation and distribution mechanisms.And this could have happened in a big way through a deliberate policy of subsidies and incentives had the government initiated it at least 15 years back.Costs of solar and wind have been drastically coming down over the last 2 years and could have come down further had the government encouraged greater investments.Left purely to market forces,good things like interest in renewable energy will not increase automatically.
It's interested lobbies that tweak the policies for establishing mega and ultra-mega power projects based on coal and gas,even knowing fully well the dwindling availability of these sources,with the obvious aim of somehow monopolizing the power sector and controlling the energy pricing.Mega projects concentrated in a few locations will have to hopelessly depend on a transmission grid.
India needs to be prepared for repeated disasters.
Renewables is certainly not so local as it looks. Anyone reading the german 100% renewables scenarios know this. Because of intermittency, renewables like solar & wind need actually more long distance high voltage lines.
And because wind & solar do not bring any insurance of capacity (power being actually there), you're still forced to build the stationary power plants to ensure reliability of supply.
I Support @Proteos too....Everyone is talking about renewables....But you can not meet your epaking demand with the help of renewables....dr r still some developments to be taken care of.....
Sir,
Portugal lost its textile industry to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh due to lower wages. But price is only one factor when ordering goods; timely delivery, quality and supplier dependability are just as important. With constant power outages in Pakistan and now, a complete breakdown in India, the textile industry cannot deliver in time. Portugal faces no such problems and can produce 24/7. Maybe it wasn´t such a good idea to take the business to Asia?
Ursula M. Hahn
Madeira, Portugal
While I agree timely delivery, quality, and dependability are important factors - price will almost always trump them.
In the textile industry, in particular, timeliness is really not a major factor - as it is in, say, the fuel or food industries. Most people can go a good stretch of time without buying new clothes, and I have never, anywhere, ever witnessed a clothing shop running out of merchandise.
Yes, unfortunately, you are correct, the world never runs out of cheap clothes! No hope for Portugal then; we shall have to find other products.
Maybe selling Portugese wine and food to India may revive the Portugese economy. Something to think about.
Yes, low wage is not the only factor for manufacturing. That's why many manufacturing moved to China because it has more modern infrastructure (power, roads, shipping,airports) to keep the system running.
Good idea. We could enjoy some fine Portuguese port with cheese and crackers. Even if there is no electricity, we can sit in the verandah - too many air conditioners is part of the energy problem anyway.
It is funny. Grid collapse happened during very early hours in the morning. How come ex power minister (shinde) says that it was due to extra withdrawal of power by some states, when grid had frequency of 50+hz... As usual incompetent Indian politicians have a habit of shooting from hip..