Fighting the dark

India is growing at 9 per cent a year. Its demand for power should grow at an even greater rate; poverty-reduction means creating jobs for people in manufacturing,and in order to get industries going we need electricity to be available and reliable. So India needs to get power generation off the ground. Power generation,even more so perhaps than most other infrastructure sectors,is crucial,a growth-pusher,and the state needs to ensure that capacity continues to grow.

Yet,however ambitious the plans to supersize electricity generation might be,we keep on running into the same old constraint: there isnt enough coal. The coal ministry has told the group of ministers studying the issue that,because of a shortage of coal,plants commissioned in 2009-10 are operating at 42 per cent efficiency,an absurdly low level. In contrast,internationally inspected nuclear power plants in India are operating at 100 per cent efficiency now that the Indo-US nuclear deal has cleared the way for fuel im-ports. Future power plants,or those being commissioned this financial year,will simply not have coal to operate,the ministry added. This is a severe constraint; we are missing out on not only the 24,000 megawatts of capacity they were supposed to have added,but also on,the ministry estimates,almost 22 gigawatts of energy this year. Those are truly shocking numbers,especially in a growing economy,and one struggling to avert lower growth this year than the trend something pointed out by an

Asian Development Bank survey on Wednesday.

There are three ways to fix this. One is to increase the efficiency of Coal India; several coal blocks given over to its use are extracting at little over half the expected rate. This requires greater reform of one of Indias few remaining public-sector monopolies. Or the environment ministry could ease up its restrictions on no-go areas,as the Planning Commission advises. And,finally,ports and connectivity need to be enhanced so coal imports can help make up the deficit. All three are necessary reforms.