Powerless Superpower

At this moment while I am writing this post, its power outage in Chennai. I stay at one of the mainline area.  But even then power outage from 45 minutes to 120 minutes is common every day. In Chennai, a day and specially night without power is like spending time in boiler.  And it is condition of one of the metro city of India.  So can you guess about the small town and thousands of villages! It is real horrible situation out there.  In Maharashtra, there are many villages where power cut from 6 AM to 11 PM Haa! This is the time span when anybody would require electricity normally.  In today’s world electricity is synonym for life. But, as usual Indians have this bad habit to adapt to even bad and wrong things. Watch Swades movie.

Today, all states are producing at least 1000 MW power less than required. And hence load shedding is the everyday word. There is no power for on an average for Four hours every day all over India. So obvious question is what is the reason for this problem?  And how to improve the situation? Answer to second question is, produce more power to match the demand.  Unfortunately answers are not that straight and easy. This is India. Nothing is easy, simple and straight here.

India is not producing the enough power. After independence many power projects were started but not completed even after 25 years of work, thanks to red tape and high level corruption purged to bottom to top most officials and ministers in the irrigation department. Irrigation scam is highlighting media these days in Maharashtra. Other options in power production are thermal power plants, nuclear power plants and most abundantly available but still neglected solar energy plants. Now thanks to coal scams, coal is not available for thermal power plants. Recent examples of power outage in all northern grids and states are effect of same problem.

Nuclear power could be good solution for power deficit. If handled correctly it can solve power problems for longer time. But after Fukushima accident in Japan the safety concerns of nuclear power plants needs to be considered carefully. Unfortunately India doesn’t have good record of handling emergency situation.  But in near future only this could solve our power deficit problems.

Also India has huge potential for solar energy. Solar energy available in India is so huge that if used correctly it will be surplus all needs of 1.3 billion people.  It needs to be tapped and utilized in all possible ways. But the basic issue in solving all problems is lack of will power from government and corruption purged to all levels of society.

They say India will be world economic power by year 2020. Many nations are already in this race. In many ways China face same problems that India is facing. But they have very different way to solve them. They have very different social and government structure. Due to which they are resolving their all problems including power problems with stunning pace. The hydro project of Three Gorges is the best example of that. In India it is almost impossible to complete such huge power project in less time that she has.

So questions remains how India will be super power without power.