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Perils of privatising power

Kashmir Times. Dated: 6/4/2013 11:36:28 PM

Handing over to private sector will only cause further hardships to consumers

After the government’s abject failure to rein in the power crisis in Jammu and Kashmir, chief minister Omar Abdullah’s latest remedy of seeking private partnership in a sector that is vital for the needs of the people of the state spells total disaster. Last year the chief minister, instead of talking about the absence of a cohesive power policy, had sought to put the entire onus of the power crisis on the people, blaming them for non-payments without realising that poor power generation, transmission losses and poor quality and quantity of power supply is hardly something over which the hapless consumers have any degree of control. Even as regards the defaulters, the government departments comprised a major chunk of these because most of them do not even have the budgetary provision for essential services like electricity bills. The analysis was fraught with flaws. Consequently, the remedy wasn’t expected to be any way realistic for a solution of the power crisis.. Rather what Omar Abdullah spelled on Monday appears to be a potent recipe for disaster, primarily because it would thrust upon the consumers an unjust, unaccountable and unresponsive system of power distribution and supply, where the poor would be the least served. Providing essential public services to the people is a responsibility of the government and its public sector undertakings. It is not the job of the private sector which is tuned to earn huge profits at the cost of the common people. The public services need to be in the public sector which is supposed to work for public good and not for profit. The major pitfalls of roping in the private sector would be that the big business groups will reap gigantic profits by jacking up electricity prices and this will further add to the miseries of the consumers, particularly those from middle, poor and marginal sections of the society. The rural areas and other backward areas, where the suppliers do not expect much profit would be either denied power facilities or charged heavily which they can hardly afford.
The Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) being mulled by the state government is aimed at providing electricity to only the two capital cities of Jammu and Srinagar, which would consequently create even more acute shortage of power for rest of the state. Besides, it would create injustice within the two capital cities with the elite getting a larger share of the public service while depriving and dispossessing the others through inequitable and irregular power supply, without keeping a provision for power subsidies. The benefits would percolate down to the better off people at a price while the poor who can ill-afford the required amount of quality and quantity of power will remain dispossessed. The chief minister’s promise of providing electricity to these two cities 24X7 without increasing the tariff is not based on the ground reality of how the private sector enterprise works with greed, and not quality, as the essence of the latter’s functioning. While the state government’s new spelled out power policy is still not clear, the chief minister has talked about roping in the private sector for both generation and distribution as well as management of power. The private sector involvement in generation is further going to jeopardize the interests of the people of the state as it is not known how much of this power generation would be distributed within the state and whether the surplus would be sold out at handsome profits outside the state. From giving the northern grid a major share of the power generation from Jammu and Kashmir, it may eventually mean offering an even greater share to the greed oriented private sector. Besides, it would put an excessive burden on the water and land resources, with corporate greed dictating the course of dispossession of masses, especially from the rural areas, owing to massive plundering of the natural resources, which these people depend upon, for power generation. The policy may inspire a slew of impressive power projects which may neither promise better electricity to the people nor ensure their safety and security in terms of lives, livelihood and sustainability as mega power projects are known to be failures in terms of the displacements they trigger, the landforms they disturb and the natural disasters they attract.
Omar Abdullah’s dream would not be a folly but a nightmare for the people. He should forget privatising the public services like electricity. Rather, he needs to think of treating the rot within the existing power sector by introducing reforms and a work culture, sans its corrupt practices, besides bargaining with the Centre for a better power sharing deal, augmenting power supply by additional generation without disturbing ecolging and tapping alternative energy sources. Nothing more.