Mumbai shortages highlight India power crunch

India's financial hub of Mumbai is threatened with its first power cuts in decades, underscoring the depth of a power crisis that is crimping the country's economic potential.

Mumbai, which aims to be a global financial centre, might have cobbled enough supply together to keep its air-conditioning and fans on for now and avoid the hours of blackouts suffered daily by its outlying areas, as well as other towns and cities.

But to highlight the problem's urgency, power supplier Tata Power Co. Ltd has urged Mumbai citizens to cut down air-conditioning use, change light bulbs and put computers on sleep mode to conserve energy.

"This is a wake up call for India. This city was long an island of stability," said V. Raghuraman, energy adviser to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

"It shows India's piecemeal strategy for dealing with power shortages can't go on forever."

India, which has a population of 1.1 billion, has suffered power shortages for years, especially in the peak summer months when temperatures in some parts of the country can reach more than 45 degrees celsius (113F).

But an economy which has grown at about 9% for two years and an expanding middle class are hotting up demand for electrical goods as well as malls, air-conditioned homes and offices, which are springing up across the country.

Even the capital, New Delhi, is not immune to long cuts, forcing the city's chief minister to threaten power firms with fines. Gurgaon, an IT hub near New Delhi, suffers up to four hours a day of cuts that have sparked protest from residents.

In the eastern city of Kolkata, 2 million customers live without power for up to eight hours a day, worse than the two to three hours of previous years.

Villages often spend half the day cut off as power gets diverted to factories and offices.

"This in an annual problem, but this year the problem has been even more acute," said Harry Dhaul, of the Independent Power Producers Association of India.

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Mumbai power shortage
Posted by Hombil, Muscat, Oman on Thursday 26 April 2007 at 17:41 UAE time


In India, unless politicians have India's interests at heart, such crisis will continue to hound India. With politicians busy bickering about religious matters and caste system etc. and the beaurocrates busy with their red tapism, India lags behind countries like China.

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