by DiaNuke.org |
The two successive blackouts on July 30th and 31st, each lasting more than ten hours, caused a havoc in throughout northern India. Whatever be the excuses put forward by the government, years of neglect of power sector reform and misplaced investment priorities are at the root of the crisis.
On the first blackout day, confronted with a volley of questions from the tormented electricity users, the Union Power Minister nonchalantly tried to explain away on the TV channels, saying how his Ministry was planning huge generation capacity additions and how the situation would improve in the “coming years”. He tried to place the blame on power overdrawals by some 'errant' States. He even tried to take cover behind a blackout that occurred in New York some years ago, saying that we should not view the latest blackout in our country so seriously when even developed countries in the west faced such problems. He was so anxious to prove the point that he proudly informed the impatient questioners that some of the developed countries had sought advice from the Indian power sector experts on solving the blackout problems in the west. What he however forgot to say conveniently was that we rarely heeded to the advice of the very same experts, who provided excellent advice to the others!
The problems faced by the residents of Delhi and the other places were of immediate urgency. They wanted to know why such a debilitating grid collapse was allowed to occur in the first instance and why it had taken such a long time for the authorities to restore power supplies. There was visible anger in their voice. They wanted immediate solution to the problem, not verbose generalisations. As if to call the bluff, there was a multiple grid collapse the next day, a sequence of crises that cannot easily be forgotten for a long, long time.
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