Festival of darkness

Mumbai has gone dark. The great city’s suburbs have faced power cuts of near-unprecedented length over the past few days; Thane district has endured rolling outages from four to seven hours. In Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad,factories fell silent during 10-hour cuts last week; the distribution companies want to formalise this,by enforcing a holiday every Thursday,with no power from 6 am till 10 pm. That’s the situation in India’s industrial and commercial heartland; the rest of India isn’t doing a lot better,either.

Why are we here? For once,this isn’t entirely to do with inefficient distribution; there are deeper supply constraints at work. Two-thirds of India’s electricity comes from 86 coal-fired thermal power plants. And coal is getting scarce. Around 40 of those plants have less than enough coal for a week of operation; some are down to their last few days’ worth. There is little doubt that things are only likely to get worse. The festival of lights,this year,will not be as bright as all that.

Why have we wound up in this situation? Part of the reasons are temporary: heavy rains have blocked coal deliveries in the east; there’s been a strike at Coal India’s fields in central India; and production in the south has been held up by the Telangana agitation. But the lack of supply space is down to structural reasons. First,the communication network is simply not good enough,with coal lying unused at railheads. Second,environmental clearances and the go/no-go brouhaha have held up the exploitation of new deposits. And finally,to complete the short-sightedness,India’s thermal power plants have not been designed to be able to use imported coal in sufficient proportions. What is notable is that each of these,bar the rains,is a planning and policy failure. The Centre must ensure that the right lessons are learnt from this time of darkness.