How do people in India cope with power cuts?

In a thrilling scene from a Tamil movie, a cardiac surgeon - played by the inimitable Vijayakanth- and his team of doctors are carrying out a complicated procedure on a patient, when the electricity supply to the operating room fails. Pitch darkness sets in. To their dismay, they discover that the inverter battery has also been fully discharged. Adding to the emergency, the generator refuses to start. In this critical moment, Vijayakanth takes control. With commendable poise and composure, he tells his eight assistants to hold up their mobile phones. With the light of the devices, he completes the operation and saves the patient! The audience heaves a collective sigh of relief and admiration. 
The message that I believe the director has delivered well in that scene, is that Indians have long accepted the inevitability of power failure and realised the futility of complaining. And they try to cope with it in different and ingenious ways. 

Most large process industries have their captive power plants running continuously. Smaller-scale industries install back-up diesel generator sets, though they can ill-afford the high cost of generation. So do most commercial establishments and residential complexes. Inverters with batteries sell like hot cakes. Every cell phone tower needs to have a diesel genset- if it has to ensure 24x7 connectivity. In every house, a stock of candles is kept - to be lit up when power fails. Security guards have to be trained to pull out screaming people from elevators when they get stuck in between floors. 

In villages without electrification, more than 75% of subsidised kerosene is used for low-grade lighting. Village houses are designed to hold kerosene lamps in a 'tobo' specially built into the wall, and to keep them out of reach of children. These lamps provide a luminescence far less than that of a 10W bulb.  

Farmers stay up at nights to start pump sets when the power comes on – if at all – for a few hours. Some years back, I remember a newspaper story that reported a sudden increase in snake-bite related deaths in rural Andhra Pradesh. It turned out that farmers had to get up at 2am and walk with kerosene lamps through fields to start the pump sets, which exposed them to more snake bites. But life went on.

Two years back, when interior districts in Tamil Nadu faced power cuts for 12-13 hours a day, people had to find creative methods to survive. Near Madurai, I saw a photocopier owner display two rates, one if/when grid power supply was fortuitously available and another when he had to keep his generator on. A bank officer told me, in the midst of his yawning, that every night, power was cut every alternate hour by rotation, in two parts of the town. So inverters were also not getting charged. He tried his best to keep the air-conditioners at full blast in the hour when power supply was on, hoping that the room would stay cool enough in the next hour, for his children to continue sleeping. Unfortunately, many others tried the same trick, overloading the system and causing repeated tripping. Then there was the mosquito menace. He had to replace the liquid repellents (that needed power) with repellent creams, smoke coils and battery-powered swatters.

The floodlights at the Chepauk stadium in Chennai (and, possibly, other venues too) for the IPL cricket matches at night are powered by large diesel generators. The organisers dare not take chances with the EB supply. Imagine the pandemonium in the stadium if the lights went off just when Dhoni lifts the ball into the sky and the umpire later called it just a “four”.

In many weddings, it is considered more prudent to hire portable generators and keep them on. Lights going off before an auspicious moment can be interpreted by the groom’s side as a bad omen. 

At a music concert I attended a few years back, the power supply suddenly failed and the microphones stopped working. Prof TN Krishnan and his accompanists continued playing as if to remind the audience that music has been around much longer than electricity. Soon after he became President, Dr Abdul Kalam was delivering a speech in a school and, inevitably, the power went off. Dr Kalam just walked down from the stage, asked the students to surround him and continued to talk to them in his normal voice. He – and the students – knew that this was part of life. 

In the eighties, when there was power-staggering in Ahmedabad, many of the factories had to work on Sundays and close down on a week-day when power supply would be stopped in that area. Sunday also happened to be the day when Doordarshan aired the Ramayan and later, the Mahabharat serials. This caused a conflict. Due to a strong representation by the Union that they shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to watch these programs with their families, factories agreed to close on Sundays and operate on the entire power-cut day with the help of diesel gensets, passing on the additional cost to their customers, no doubt. When the industrial units and the employees were working out this compromise, it never occurred to them to approach the Govt/EB to implore them to find means to overcome the power deficiency. They knew what the outcome would be.

Things have improved in the last decade, especially in metros, but even in the better-managed states, the degree of reliability is nowhere near the standards that consumers in developed countries take for granted. Also, the supply to rural areas continues to be non-existent or undependable. 

The heavy reliance on coal for power generation is often justified on the basis of its low cost. For, as the belief goes, Indian consumers cannot afford to pay more. This, therefore, rules out other fuels- such as gas, as a possible means to generate power.

But, coal-power plants require large investments and face opposition from environmentalists for its higher carbon emission, the difficulty in ash disposal and the high water consumption. These result in delay at every stage- land acquisition, financial closure, construction and commissioning. Capacity addition, therefore, has constantly fallen behind targets. And shortages keep growing, leading to power cuts. The solution proposed during every 5-year plan was, you guessed right, more coal-powered plants. 

Is the Indian consumer so obsessed with the cost of power that only coal-power plants can offer? Even if it means a considerable compromise on his/her quality of life? 
From the anecdotes I’ve narrated above, it is evident that Indians not only find ways to cope with power cuts, they are also compelled to spend a considerable amount of money to ensure a steadier supply of power. 

What is the cost of these coping mechanisms that consumers resort to? What’s the real, total cost of power that they incur? And what are the consequential damages caused by poor power supply? We'll take a look at that in the next piece.

M. Rajagopalan is a Market Development Director, Middle East, Asia and Australia in a multinational organisation in the power sector, and is based in Chennai. Views are his own.    

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