The power to change reality

By June this year, you could be sitting in the office of the distribution circle at Faridabad, Haryana, and be able to see, on the computer screen, just how much power is going into the cluster of houses in Sector 16, or perhaps to the big industrial units on the main Mathura Road. And instead of a meter-reader visiting your house, the readings could get registered by a remote van, or perhaps at the distribution office itself. Ditto for nearby Karnal, Panipat, Sonepat in Haryana, or Mohali and Patiala in Punjab.

Sounds a bit like a dream doesn’t it? Possibly, but this time around, Power Minister Suresh Prabhu has virtually put his job on the line — everything is on schedule, he insists, and is part of the quiet work he began over a year ago. In a model that covers roughly a seventh of the country’s power circles, his ministry has drawn up a plan to clean up the huge mess in the country’s power distribution system, a system that accounts for the bulk of the annual Rs 20,000 crore in power theft.

But before we talk of Prabhu’s plans for these 63 Centres of Excellence, let us look at the ground situation. Power is produced by various government or privately-owned plants, and is then sent to the state electricity boards, from where the voyage into the great unknown begins. From here on, there’s almost no accounting for where the electricity goes. There are some details of what goes to the 400-odd circles, but nothing of what happens after that.

Naturally, since there is no record of how much power went to, say, the 11kv feeder centre, there is no way you can ask officials in charge why they didn’t collect the bills — and even if you did, you would still have no clue as to whether or not there was a shortfall. This is the system everyone loved. You could steal as much as you wanted — sure, you knew that theft had taken place, but you didn’t know where. This meant that there was no question of holding anyone accountable, much less prosecuting him/her.

But what makes Prabhu so confident he will be able to instal the meters he needs to, or that state electricity board officials, who steal Rs 20,000 crore annually, will not rip these off? The country’s richest and best-known man, that’s who. Infosys’ N.R. Narayana Murthy, among another firms like Tata Consultancy Services, have made presentations to the ministry on the use of software to make such on-line billing possible — software that will generate data, for instance, on the flow of electricity to various circles and sub-circles on a half-hourly basis.

So you can tamper with your meter if you like but at a control centre somewhere, an alarm bell will ring, when the computer account of the power you have consumed does not match with what your meter shows. Or let us say officials at the 11kv distribution centre decide to jam their meters, to hide how much electric power they have got — problem is, the computer has independently got data on how much power they consumed. And, of course, with this distribution centre becoming a profit centre, officials here will get generous incentives if they collect more revenue and cut theft. And, of course, if they don’t collect more, they get caught out easily.

As for the state governments, who are in charge of the power sector thanks to an obvious mistake made by the framers of our Constitution, the central government is employing a bit of carrot and stick. It is not releasing some of their grants unless they agree to carry out these reforms.

Last year, for instance, Kerala didn’t get Rs 47 crore as it never signed a Memorandum of Understanding for carrying out certain power-sector reforms, and around Rs 48 crore was held back from Bihar. Besides, the money for these meters and software, around Rs 100 crore over three years per circle (or around Rs 40,000 crore for the country), is to be paid for by the central government.

As for the rest (the 400 circles minus the 63 Centres of Excellence), Prabhu promises there’s some major action being taken here as well. All circles will have to fill in data on exactly what their assets are, how much electricity they draw, how many users are metered, and so on.

All this will, of course, be validated by the software that will be installed all over the country by the end of six months. So, by this time, there will at least be a complete mapping of where the electricity produced is being consumed in the country. And once the results of the 63 Centres of Excellence are in, over a period of a few years, the other circles will also be fully metered, perhaps even down to the house level, but certainly up to a cluster-of-houses or colony level. By then, whatever else India’s power problems may be, the Rs 20,000 crore annual theft won’t be one of them. That’s Prabhu’s promise.

Tailpiece: Remember the date this column began with. If, by June 1, or maybe with a grace period of a month or so, you can’t sit in the Faridabad centre and get on-line information like the way Prabhu has promised, ask for his head. For that is the only way to deal with India’s chronic problem, best described in that lovely Chinese saying — the plans are man’s, the odds are God’s.

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