Fantasies of power in muddle-along India

The day the power went off in Delhi and northern India, I was at home in Bangalore, a city that fortunately escaped the blackout. It brought back memories of my student days in Kolkata, a city then (in the 1980s) notorious for its power cuts. Eight or 10 hours without electricity were de rigueur. The fan would stop working at night: at 38C and 90 per cent humidity, this meant no sleep until the power came back. We would gather outside, talking in groups, varying our routine by walking to the highway that ran alongside our campus, where dhabas served tea (and stronger stuff) all night.

Even now, many villages have electricity for only four to six hours a day and some still have no power at all. As a student, I awoke when the fan went off. On the other hand, peasants wake themselves up when the lights come back, to use the tubewells that irrigate their fields.

Indians have long been used to erratic power supply; yet the recent outages were special, spectacular in their scale and impact. Twenty one out of 28 states were without power for long stretches. Some 600m Indians were affected. It is not yet clear what caused the collapse. With the monsoon having failed, it is far hotter and drier than is usual at this time of year, driving the rich to use more air conditioning and peasants to rely more heavily on their tubewells. In the rush to satisfy their citizens, individual states drew more than their share from the National Grid. As The Hindu newspaper reported, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttarakhand all “ignored strong warnings from the ... Central Electricity Regulatory Commission to maintain grid discipline and stop over-drawal”.

Behind this short-term political desperation lies a longer-term institutional decline. Back in the 1990s, the distinguished energy scientist A.K.N. Reddy outlined a strategy to overcome India’s energy crisis. This focused on reducing theft and distribution losses (estimated at 30-40 per cent of total consumption), upgrading transmission and end-use technologies and running state electricity boards professionally. The suggestions were disregarded. Antiquated technologies were not replaced. Political interference and corruption continued.

On the same day as the power outage in the north, some bogies in a train in south India caught fire. Forty passengers perished. Although less widely reported in the western media, this accident was likewise symptomatic of the failure of state-run institutions that are crucial to social wellbeing. Hundreds of millions of Indians use the railways every year. They are indispensable to work and family life, carrying migrants back to their homes and to their first jobs.

Between April 2010 and March 2012, the Indian railway system suffered 218 accidents, in which some 500 people died. Successive railway ministers have disregarded safety and technological modernisation in favour of running more lines to their own states and constituencies.

As with railways and electricity boards, so also with public health and education departments. Indeed, the degradation of state institutions is perhaps the most serious threat to the vitality of Indian democracy and to the long-term success of India’s “growth story”.

Four years ago, I wrote an essay for Outlook magazine, mocking the claim – then commonly made by the country’s political, business and media elite – that India could or would become a superpower. I argued that despite electoral democracy and high growth rates, there remained pervasive faultlines. These included religious and caste chauvinisms, rising social inequalities, corruption and environmental degradation. I was not optimistic that these faultlines would be easily corrected, given the “decline in the quality and capability of our politicians and public officials” and “the apathy and corruption of the state”.

I further argued that: “in the short term, at any rate, the Indian political class can only get more corrupt, and the Indian state more inefficient. In the current, fragmented, political scenario, short-term rent-seeking will take precedence over long-term policy formulation. This shall be true of governments in the states, as well as at the centre”. Far from becoming a superpower, I concluded, India would muddle along in the middle – as it always had. At the time, I was derided as a party-pooper and professional sceptic. I was accused of lacking patriotism and even of being a “western stool pigeon”.

So far as I can tell, the short-term is still with us. How else to explain the fact that on the very day the lights went off in 21 states, the power minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, was promoted to the post of home minister? His tenure in his previous position was undistinguished. However, he is a long-term loyalist (not to say acolyte) of the Congress party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. Besides, he hails from Maharashtra, where a state election is due in a few months.

I need only add that, in these respects, the Congress is not exceptional. In Indian politics and public administration, personal loyalty and the appeasement of special interests take precedence over professional competence and the public good.

The writer’s books include ‘India after Gandhi’

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012