Free Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India by Pavan K. Varma

experienced the world’s biggest blackout—the northern, eastern and northeastern grids collapsed, simultaneously affecting over 350 million people. The immediate cause was lax grid discipline, but the fundamental problem remains an acute shortage of power. Added to this are endemic issues of unchecked power theft, poor maintenance of transmission lines, the absence of a strong regulatory authority and populist policies including free giveaways. These problems are not beyond management; they can be tackled with good governance. The Gujarat government is reported to have ‘filed over a 100,000 FIRs against power thieves, segregated its feeders and today has 24x7 three-phase power supply to all its 18,000 villages.’ 6 Better governance is also the reason why the current government in Madhya Pradesh has more than doubled its installed generation capacity and, by 2013, hopes to supply power 24x7.
    Five years ago the shortage of coal was 43 million tons. Today it is over 140 million tons. This is an unbelievable situation for a country with the world’s fourth largest coal reserves. The reason for this artificial scarcity has been glaringly plain to governments for years now. The monopoly of Coal India Limited, a public sector company which the government accepts wastes 25 per cent of what it mines, has to end. The Coalgate scam in 2012, in which the government was accused of mala fide and arbitrary allocations of captive coal mines to a chosen few, rightly grabbed the national headlines. However, for the long term, what is needed is to bring in a coal regulator, introduce pricing reforms, and open up coal to the private sector. Secondly, while environment issues are important, it is equally essential to have transparent and scientific rules to govern extraction. The arbitrary policy of ‘go/no go’ for mining clearance has jeopardized 600 million tons of coal in 203 mining blocks. Policy making in this area is near frozen since decisions are split between various departments dealing with power, coal, land and environment. As large parts of the country struggle with seemingly perennial power scarcity, the government’s routine response is to set up yet another Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM).
    Paralysis in governance hits the quality of life of every Indian, in every walk of life. The Indian railways, with one of the largest networks in the world, is used by millions of Indians. But today, their safety is seriously at stake. In 2011, a major train accident occurred almost every month; some months recorded more than one accident, the worst being July 2011, when there were as many as seven accidents claiming over a hundred lives. From April to July 2012, there were ten accidents claiming eighty-seven lives. Currently the network productivity of Indian railways is half that of China. The railways ministry needs to urgently enhance safety measures by investing in new rolling stock, track renewals, training, electrification and electronic signalling; the cost of doing all this has been estimated by two expert committees set up by the government at anything between one lakh crore to eight lakh crore. Raising passenger fares is the obvious step in response to such a situation, since Indian railways is deeply in the red. However, the compulsions of political expediency have persuaded successive railways ministers to shut their eyes to the solution. Nitish Kumar raised fares in 2002, but his successor Lalu’s short-sighted populism led him to actually reduce fares on three occasions. Mamata Bannerjee as railways minister went against the advice of the PM and finance minister and did not raise fares for eight years. The support of her Trinamool Congress party was vital to the ruling coalition and so she got away with it. In any case, fighting her political battles in West Bengal, she hardly had any time to devote to her department and look at alternative policies to get the country’s railways back on track, such as involving