What once was a whisper in Vidarbha’s industry and business has now become a loud buzz -- about the messed up power policy that is driving industrial units out of Maharashtra and towards the neighbouring States of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Illogical power tariffs and ill-conceived cross-subsidies extending over years have become millstones around the necks of commercial and industrial users of power in the region that has as many as one super-critical thermal power station at Koradi, one super thermal power station at Chandrapur, and one thermal power station each at Khaparkheda and Paras (near Akola). The region produces power, but starves on the very count -- thanks to unmanageably heavy tariffs and unprofessional power management that includes generational glitches. As a result, not one single user-sector is happy -- the industry, the agriculture, and the domestic segment. Everybody keeps paying through nose for power of a suspect quality -- in stark contrast to the power scenario in the neighbouring States. The problem is that the power planners of Maharashtra appear to think in a unilinear manner whereas the power sector management is a multi-linear and complex process.

 

This inference comes from a simple analogy of how the industrial, commercial and domestic sectors are paying a heavier price for subsidising the use of electricity by the agriculture sector. Here, too, the situation is far more complex than the obvious. The State Government has often shied away from acting tough and specific about power supply to the farm sector simply because it does not want to hobnob with the vast votebank the farmers form. So, the farms have to be fed power at the cost of other sectors. As a result, every sector appears to be suffering for long -- since it has to bear the burden of power supply to the farms. Every power sector expert agrees that this ‘Rob-Peter-To-Pay-Paul’ policy has pushed Vidarbha’s industrial, commercial and domestic power users down to their respective bottom-lines and even lower. ‘Most budgets in these three sectors have gone out for a toss’, is the comment most often heard for quite some time. Losses and bill defaults just worsen the problem. Forming a separate company for power supply to the farm sector may be a reasonable solution to the otherwise ticklish issue, said R.B. Goenka who has spent years in serious comprehension of Maharashtra’s power sector woes.

 

As a person involved in official eco-system of power sector management, he has been offering advice to the Government on core reforms in power sector -- only to little avail. For, whatever has been achieved by way of reforms in power sector actually touches the fringes, thus keeping it deprived of the benefits of creative application of mind to sort out the problems that appear quite within the realm of solution. Whenever discussions turn to the problems of power sector and the illogical tariff structure for various sectors-within sectors, those who claim to understand the issues tend to push the blame to the cross subsidies to the farm sector at the cost of other sectors. A little deeper pursuance of the scenario, however, brings one to an unfortunate inference that blaming the cross subsidy to the farm sector is only an easy way out -- since it does not suggest any credible solution to the illogically high tariffs to industrial and commercial sectors.

 

On this count, even the domestic power sector, too, is not without its complaint that the owners of the residential dwellings have to keep paying ever-higher power bills every passing month. Of course, some power sector reforms (about which much discussion often takes place in concerned circles) have been undertaken but have not served their purpose fully at least so far. Despite comprehensive regulatory norms that have been imposed on the power sector nationally, Maharashtra’s power sector has continued to under-perform on several counts. And the most serious sufferer of the malady is Vidarbha region and its industrial, commercial, domestic and farm sectors.