The Land of Darkness

This story is from the land governed by narcissists, it may be true for few other states of the country as well, but I speak for the one I have firsthand experience with. Country’s most populous state and in what state! ; The account here is from the eastern most part of the state, where overwhelmingly large part of the population is dependent upon agriculture for their livelihood.
In the present when we as a country boast a stupendous record of an impressive GDP growth rate year after year for close to one decade now, the situation here is quite disturbing. To my understanding, power is the ‘most’ important resource or growth enabler for growth, and mind you this power is not the power that the people of this land are more bothered about, this is the power that runs industries but as unfortunate as it is, people here are much more active about the power that a democracy like ours bestows upon the elected representatives. I think power is most important because other infrastructure will come in as and when the demand comes, but without power you would never see the demand come in.
We often talk about growth for now forget growth, this district has seen degradation of basic infrastructure in the past. Till some 10 years back the average electricity supply was about 16hrs a day which has dropped to a near 12hrs a day, that is the kind of ‘growth’ we are talking here. The district even saw its MP rise to become the PM for a short stint, but all that to this consequence! Governments came and went while the district slowly and quite steadily slumped into worse states, while the representatives the people selected were busy building their own empires. Of course the people themselves are at fault, they themselves don’t know their priorities, otherwise how can one explain a political party that blows thousands of crores of state government funds on building parks with statues of animals (elephants & few others :-P..I wonder if you get the joke) still continue to run the government without any problem. That kind of money was big enough to lessen the power deficit the state has, not by a large quantity but intent wise would have been big enough. It’s amusing how such thoughtless, shameful projects are implemented so fast when the ones those are needed never see the light of the day.
I know people who think its unimaginable to have long power cuts in summers, infact for that matter most of my Google generation doesn’t actually know what its like to live without power..an odd day’s power cut doesn’t even come close to what it’s like to live in a place which has electrification just for the sake of records. Have you ever wondered how would it be to live in such a place? Well right now I am in one such place, thankfully I am one of the very few fortunate ones around as we have all possible means of power generation, gensets, solar panels, invertors etc. but not all have access to such facilities, infact this district has a population of more than 30 lakhs which survives on an upto* 8 hrs of electricity supply a day! The kind of electricity that is wasted every day in lighting up these stone parks built across the state could very well be used to power many such villages in the same state.
Some people in the towns are willing to pay any price to ensure uninterrupted supply, but not all can afford that. All this breeds resentment, people don’t pay electricity bills…in fact the number of legitimate electricity connections is very very low as compared to actual nos. The state power boards are sick, but this vicious cycle has to break somewhere. It’s no brainer to guess that the government can only initiate any such major shift of state, but unfortunately the political parties in power don’t have the political will to take steps like privatizing the distribution & billing of power at least. You can very well argue that privatization is not the end of all problems but I know one thing for sure, right now I have access to the internet(GPRS based), but no electricity!, thanks to the private telecom companies. Also, it is working great in most of the places and so I have no reason to think otherwise. Even in the power generation space Pvt. players are awarded projects but they face far too many hurdles unlike that in construction of parks across the state, strange isn’t it? What is more amusing is how these very electricity boards manage to provide almost 24hrs electricity supply in the same areas when elections are around the corner..Power of democracy! Isn’t it?? 🙂
P.S: For record the place I am talking about is Ballia, Uttar Pradesh.