The Hindu Business Line : Dark days in rural Maharashtra

The Maharashtra State Electricity Board building in Mumbai... Is the MSEB guilty of an elaborate cover-up for its failure to supply power to one of the most industrially active regions?

MOST moffusil regions in Maharashtra are going through long power blackout spells. Why is this happening? Is it an act of God, or of the enemy, or just a brainwave of some godfather of the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) to put a decent cloak on generation shortages, colossal transmission losses, corruption and financial bankruptcy?

Businessmen who encounter a bad patch and reach the brink of insolvency often take recourse to criminal subterfuge. They organise dacoities on their own premises and engineer fires at their business locations. They have a double motive. One, they make it look as if their economic misfortune was an act of God, or of an enemy, and in no way related to their own failure or incompetence. Two, contingent losses attributable to the mishaps make it possible to tally their inventory registers as also accounts. If they are lucky and insured, they may even be able to prefer a claim against the insurance company.

Skullduggery of this sort is not the exclusive privilege of private business on skid row. It is also known in the state sector. Market intervention agencies, such as NAFED, are able to tally their accounts for procurement of onion only if sudden showers drench the procured stock enough to make it rot and putrefy.

The Maharashtra Cotton Monopoly Procurement Scheme is often blessed by `accidental' fire gutting the stocks of cotton and lint. Now, it appears , the MSEB has caught on to the idea. On May 17, apparently because of a cyclone, as many as ten high-tension towers near thermal generation centres in Maharashtra collapsed. Most parts of Maharashtra have been in darkness since then.

Power supply is almost normal in Mumbai but is acutely short, albeit within limits of tolerance, in such major cities as Nagpur, Pune and Aurangabad. The Maharashtra countryside appears to have relapsed into a pre-Edison epoch. It has been an unusually hot summer. Temperatures are scaling unprecedented levels. Drinking water has simply disappeared and the tanker network, while making fortunes for politicians and contractors, cannot even satisfy the fringe thirst. Add to that the MSEB blackout and you have an entire State cut off from the rest of the world except through the cell-operated transistor-radio sets. Even the telephone exchanges, unable to hold out during such long spells of blackout, will start clamming up one by one.

Even before the accident, villages in Maharashtra were subject to load-shedding of up to 72 hours per week. After the fortuitous `accident', the MSEB has been imposing power cuts for over 100 hours every week, blaming the accident. The collapse of the towers has made `load-shedding' redundant, as supply itself is not available most of the time.

The blackout in Maharashtra, like the famous one-night blackout in New York, is making history. What does the blackout signify? The official claim that the towers collapsed under the blast of cyclonic winds is too tenuous to believe. Meteorological records do not show any unusual cyclonic activity near Parli in Marathwada. Even if one accepts the claim, the MSEB cannot be absolved of all responsibility. If the towers were erected such that they could not withstand local winds, clearly, there is something wrong with MSEB's engineering department.

Was the blackout a `dress rehearsal' ordered by civil defence authorities in preparation for a possible break-out of hostilities with Pakistan? It could not be. Most of the targets that would interest an enemy continue to glitter like islands of light in an ocean of darkness.

In fact, it would be more plausible to claim that the blackout is an ISI ploy to make the favourite targets stand out. You cut off the power lines near the generation or feeder points, and the bureaucracy will simply abandon the countryside, while doing its best to keep power supply going in the cities.

But leaving aside politics and war strategies, and sticking to economic considerations, the blackout in Maharashtra reminds one of the kind of catastrophe foretold by Ayn Rand — the creator of objectivism — in her celebrated novel Atlas Shrugged.

The plot of the novel moves round the efforts of one man to improve quality of rail-tracks. The establishment scoffs at his effort and persists in its age-old methods. One day, the inevitable happens and the disaster strikes when two speeding express trains collide head-on, right in the midst of a mile-long tunnel.

Freak accidents increase in frequency and take an unusually large toll when an inefficient state starts collapsing. In this novel it comes to pass that the administration has to abandon all plans for rescue and relief; it decides to simply close down the tunnel and divert traffic.

A confirmation of Ayn Rand's thesis came in Chernobyl in the declining years of the erstwhile USSR. The same symptoms have been visible in India for quite some time. Trains are derailing or ramming into each other every now and then, and one often hears of near-misses in mid-air aircraft collision.

The power blackout in Maharashtra does not permit any happy interpretation. If it is not an ISI plot or a forerunner of more blackouts to come, it might portend much worse. The MSEB has been in serious trouble for a long time.

It has the mandate to ensure supply of power to the country's industrially most advanced regions. But it has failed badly.

It has come out all tarnished in the Enron episode. Its accounts are in red as the farmers are simply refusing to pay the power bills which, they demonstrate convincingly, are unfair and fraudulent.

The chances are that some anonymous well-wisher of the MSEB is trying to push its privatisation — not for power generation or distribution, but to escape bankruptcy through recourse to criminal acts.

(The author is Founder, Shetkari Sanghatana. Feedback may be sent to sharad@mah.nic.in)

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