Light Up My Life

This was late one evening last week after power distribution in the capital had changed hands. All evening, we had been skirting Delhi’s southern rim, and all evening, electricity had skirted us. Somewhere along the road, the capital’s old powerhorse had loomed into view. By night and from a distance, the Badarpur Power Plant is the vision of a liner in distress, its smogged out lights blinking and fading. Its exhausts reassuringly blow smoke, but its hinterland is at sea, a vast pool of darkness save one little island. The fort city of Tughlaqabad, abandoned centuries ago by Mohammed bin Tughlaq to bands of rhesus monkeys, is bathed in the steady golden glow of sodium vapour lamps.

Resplendent as the sight is, it hadn’t amused the crowd around the broken transformer not far from the fort. Presently, the supplywallah arrived to inspect the fault. ‘‘Iska aaj kuchh nahin ho sakta, kal, kal,’’ he announced upon his dim-lit inspection. He left leaving a warning: ‘‘Aur chhed-chhad mat karna, ab yeh sarkari maal nahin hai. (Nothing can be done about this tonight, only tomorrow. And don’t fiddle with the transformer, it is no longer public property.)’’

Privatisation of power is a wracking puzzle for most and has run into familiar boulderheads: high expectation, low patience, even lower literacy about its mechanics. As one senior official in the old power setup said, ‘‘Nobody should have expected things to change overnight but we and the private companies should perhaps have worked more to educate opinion before the changeover took place.’’

BSES and TATA Power, the new discoms, plan to put in Rs 750 crores over the next five years to upgrade the capital’s power infrastructure, but improving things may require more than just money. Consider the communication gap between what the consumer expects from privatisation and what private discoms can realistically offer so soon after taking over. As the official admits, no one has bothered to tell the consumer there is no magic wand.

Then, there’s the issue of the permanent shortfall between demand and supply. Delhi is the largest single-city consumer of power, with peak demand touching nearly 3300 MW this summer. The availability is a maximum of 2800 MW.

One also needs to consider the infrastructure. Private discoms have inherited a wheezing behemoth. Most transformers and feeders are either in poor repair or defunct; nearly 60 per cent of the wiring is allegedly rotten; the switchgear is obsolete; and, most of all, maintenance is near nil.

There are also the factors of pilferage and non-existent work culture. Transmission and distribution losses account for a whopping 53 per cent of the power generated. Theft is rampant — 211 of the 500-odd feeders are regarded as theft-prone — and poor wiring adds to losses. The workforce the discoms have inherited is flabby and underutilised, typical of a poorly run PSU.