Avoiding electricity outages is tough, so, we convert it into political opportunity.
By ET Bureau |
BCCL
Representative image.
Even as in a reprise of the 1977 blackout, large parts of New York City were plunged into gloom thanks to a massive electricity outage last week, causing the Big Apple to lose some of its sheen, India’s Union minister for power, R K Singh, shed a ray of hope in what V S Naipaul once described as an Area of Darkness. Speaking at a function in Ranchi, the minister said that soon the government would “pay damages to consumers if load-shedding happens”. Any expectations that a new age of en-lightenment was about to dawn in India’s cities and villages of dreadful night were, however, dampened by the proviso that the minister added, that such unspecified damages to consumers would not be due in the case of technical glitches or natural calamities, not to mention acts of God.
The unfulfilled promises that have been made across the country of making the region in question a ‘100% power cut-free zone’ have caused wags to comment that such pledges would be 100% accurate with the omission of the word ‘cut’ in the statement. That politics can transform issues electric into matters elect-trick is evidenced by the apocryphal case of the power mantri who ruled out setting up a second hydrogenerating dam downriver of the first on the grounds that the second dam would be redundant as the upriver installation would already have taken all the bijli out of the paani.
