The worst power outage in India’s history represents a “wake up call” over the failure of the creaking electricity system to keep pace with the growth of Asia’s third-largest economy, analysts said.
The government traced the immediate cause of Tuesday’s outage — which came just a day after a massive power failure on Monday — to energy-hungry states guzzling more than their allotted power for a second straight day.
However, India’s energy problems are more than simply indisciplined state electricity boards tapping an overburdened grid — they go to the heart of the nation’s aspirations to be a rising economic power, experts said.
“This was one of the biggest power outages in the world,” said Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, referring to the collapse of the grids that knocked out power in 20 of 29 states and caused havoc at train stations, airports, hospitals and on roads.
“It is imperative our basic infrastructure requirements are in keeping with India’s aspirations,” Banerjee said, as the failure presented a dismaying picture of a country striving for a bigger role on the global stage.
Power cuts are a daily occurrence for those lucky enough to have a permanent connection in India. The country runs a peak-hour electricity shortfall of about 12 percent.
At the other end of the spectrum, hundreds of millions of Indians in rural areas have no power at all.
“We’re facing power problems of Himalayan proportions,” said Ajay Bodke, strategist at leading Indian investment house Prabhudas Lilladher. “Reforms can’t wait any longer — this is a wake-up call for immediate measures.”
Analysts said among its first actions, the government needed to get state electricity boards to abide by their power quotas and manage distribution efficiently to avoid demand crunches.
Although there are financial penalties for overdrawing, it is still cheaper for states to buy electricity from the center at set rates than from open-market national energy exchanges.
The next priority, they said, is to get the finances of the distribution utilities in order by curbing widespread theft, updating obsolete transmission networks and allowing them to increase prices.
However, tying tariffs to output costs could prove politically unpopular for the avowedly pro-people government.
“The mindset must change,” said Vivek Pandit, energy director at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. “The state boards are losing out on every minute that they sell.”
Tariffs in some states must rise by 40 percent just for state electricity boards to break even, according to London-based Eurasia Group analyst Seema Desai.
To address the root of the problem, India needs to boost supplies of coal to thermal power plants and invest in new sources of electricity to provide for its young, growing population of 1.2 billion.
On the coal front, the main supplier, state-run Coal India Ltd (CIL), has consistently failed to meet its output targets because of obsolete technology and delays in obtaining hard-to-get environmental clearances, analysts say.
CIL’s production grew by just 4.5 million tonnes year-on-year in 2011-2012 and it calculates that meeting its new fuel supply obligations will require an extra 64 million tonnes in fiscal year 2012-2013.
That’s “a target that will be impossible to achieve” under current circumstances, Desai said.
Analysts say India has been adding power station capacity to meet its needs, but some plants are idle because of fuel shortages.
India wants 25 percent of its power to be nuclear generated by 2050 in the wake of a 2008 landmark Indo-US agreement allowing New Delhi to import civilian atomic technology.
However, progress toward that goal is in doubt in the face of local opposition to nuclear power, which has held up projects.
“The entire power situation at present is headed for disaster,” said D.S. Rawat, secretary-general of Indian business lobby Assocham.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing