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ENERGY

Furnishing much less than what people need

It is well recognised that there is a link between a country’s level of prosperity and how much energy resources it can command. Countries such as the United States and Britain have for hundreds of years dispatched men round the globe in search of sources of energy. They chased whales across the oceans for their blubber and oil that would light lamps in the cities, dug deep under virtually every continent for petroleum and coal, and harnessed rapids and waterfalls fo r electricity.

Colonial India got little attention and less benefit; fossil fuels such as petrol were scarce and too expensive for its people. The monopoly interests of the Americans and the British in extraction and supply ensured that petrol, for instance, sold at Rs. 2 and 4 annas a gallon here at the time of Independence, against 13 or 14 annas a gallon in America.

Again, take electricity. In 1947, the nation’s electricity supply came from a sparse collection of stations with a total installed capacity of 1,360 MW. It was not much even by the standards of that age; today they will not even cater to half of the needs of the city of Mumbai. Just 3 per cent of the population living in six large towns used 56 per cent of the electricity generated in the entire country, with Bombay and Calcutta together cornering 40 per cent of the total.

Per capita consumption availability was just 14 kilowatt-hours a year, which in simple terms meant that if one lit a 100 watt bulb through the night, one would have used up the year’s entitlement in just a fortnight. If that sounds frugal, the First Five Year Plan (1952) document notes, in many States the per capita availability was less than one kilowatt-hour a year.

Not all the energy went to light homes. Indeed almost two-thirds of the power spun out by the motley array of coal-fired and hydro-power plants was funnelled into industrial units; just about 13 per cent of the energy powered the light in homes. There was not enough going around, and most parts of the country were not even wired to receive it.

“There are many areas where the need for more electricity is immediate, in these areas, the growth of plant capacity has not been able to keep pace with the growth of load… There is an acute shortage of power in the Bombay area, Delhi, parts of Uttar Pradesh, Madras and West Bengal,” the First Five Year Plan document pointed out in evident despair.

“Real prosperity can dawn in India when adequate power is built up… to spread it through every village, to lift water from underground reservoirs and to turn the wheels of industry, by which alone millions born and yet to be born can be fairly employed,” noted K.L. Rao, Union Minister for Irrigation and Power, some years later recognising how important it was for India to ramp up energy availability to its citizens.

Yet the record of government in furnishing energy to the nation over the 60 years since Independence does not reflect the fervour with which Independence was won.

What the First Five Year Plan said of the power situation could have been just as easily fitted into the document providing the mid-term appraisal of the Tenth Five Year Plan issued some 55 years later. The report said: “56 per cent of rural households are not electrified; power on demand remains a distant dream. Reported peaking and energy shortages are 7 per cent and 11 per cent respectively but these do not reflect the real shortages, as they do not account for suppressed demand and scheduled load shedding.”

If there is one sector where the Government’s planning and implementation mechanism has failed consistently to meet the requirements of the population, it has been in universal provision of electricity.

Electricity is still beyond the means of many households, and the State Electricity Boards, despite all the tall political promises made, have seldom been under any pressure to connect up every home and farm in their jurisdiction. Most of them make losses anyway, a total of Rs. 27,729 crore in 2004-05. It is not because they sell energy cheap, but because they produce it inefficiently — thermal efficiency at most coal-based plants is between 20-30 per cent as against 35 per cent in the developed countries — and lose a substantial proportion of what they generate in distribution — over 40 per cent of electricity produced is “lost, not billed, incorrectly billed or not collected.”

With such a leaky pot, the onus has always been on creating more capacity than would otherwise have been warranted, but the task has been consistently under-performed. During the past five years (2002-07), some 41,000 MW of new capacity was to have come up; barely half that target was achieved, leaving the national grid about 10 per cent short of capacity.

Blame for tardiness rests evenly on all electricity sources. If hydro-power projects were slowed, some by engineering challenges and others by environmental concerns, nuclear power projects were stunted for a couple of decades by international technology sanctions, and more recently by a shortage of uranium. So instead of ramping up to 10,000 MW by the year 2000, as promised in the 1980s, nuclear power capacity is still struggling to reach half that level. Wind energy, a late entrant backed by generous tax breaks, has overtaken nuclear energy in terms of generating capacity, but its worth is devalued by the fact that productive winds are seasonal and not year-round.

Turn to oil and the scenario turns grimmer. At the time of Independence Assam was the only oil-bearing region, catering to about 7 per cent of the country’s consumption. The rest of the crude oil or products were imported. It was only after the spudding of some prolific wells off the shores of Bombay in 1976 that indigenous crude production spurted, providing at its peak in 1989-90 about 34 million tonnes — which was about two-thirds the country’s need.

LOST ON THE WAY: State Electricity Boards lose a substantial proportion of what they generate in distribution. Over 40 per cent of electricity produced is lost, not billed, incorrectly billed or not collected.

Some charge that the peak production was contrived by a ruinous flogging of the wells; in any case Bombay High output gradually waned after that and despite considerable exploration activity elsewhere, national crude oil extraction has not regained the heights of 1990. That has meant imports once again catering to over 70 per cent of demand.

The volume of demand is itself an underestimate of the need. Consumption of petroleum products has been stifled by heavy taxes especially on diesel and petrol — duties garner more than Rs. 1,20,000 crore a year — and by outright denial to certain classes of consumers. Kerosene continues to be rationed, and while cooking gas is said to be freely available, new connections are not easy to get, with the result that most homes struggle with traditional fuels.

Census 2001 found over 72 per cent of households in the country used firewood, cow dung or farm waste to cook, leaving their kitchens smoky and unhealthy. Only 33 million had recourse to liquefied petroleum gas, the clean fuel.

The Ministry of Petroleum, however, recently made the point that the number of LPG customers had increased over the past six years to 95 million. Still for women in more than 100 million households, life in the kitchen has not changed for the better. They continue to forage for firewood, each for an estimated one hour a day. Together the time they waste in this effort is almost as much as that put in by the entire workforce in organised industry.

The prospect of the ocean bed at their mouths of the Krishna and the Godavari holding an enormous store of natural gas spells hope. Buoyed by rising fuel prices, both public sector and private companies have been stretching their technological and financial capabilities to reach deposits several thousand metres deep under the sea. How much gas will eventually flow to the mainland and at what price remains to be seen.

Everyone in the country must have access to clean cooking fuels, electricity to light their homes, and vehicles to carry them to work. That was a dream in 1947. It still is.