From an excellent report by Peter Foster in The Daily Telegraph:
“Energy theft in India is endemic
As regular visitors to India will know, every other street corner in every other housing colony has a clothes-pressing wallah who uses gigantic irons filled with hot coals to press the laundry of India’s well-to-do.
Usually the pressing man and his family all seem to live together in the back of the pressing man’s tent. However a new racket in east Delhi, where my Hindi teacher lives, threatens to put the old hot-coals men out of business in some areas.
She tells me that in the compound of eight blocks of flats where she lives, the basements of each of them are filled with pressing-wallahs using electric irons plugged into the sockets in the basement car-parks.
My teacher, who says she suffers power-cuts of four to six hours every day, often takes her laundry down the ironing men to be pressed.
However she is always perplexed to discover that the ironing-wallahs seem to have power when the rest of the block does not.
And when she asks the ironing man who’s electricity meter is being billed for the power he’s using he suddenly goes all coy, but promises that “it’s nobody from ‘upstairs'”.
True to the spirit of India’s nosy-neighbourhoods, my teacher is now conducting a survey of the area, convinced that the local electrician has siphoned off a mains power cable which supplies a major new park which lies behind her flats and, for reasons of public safety, has a guaranteed power supply.
I wait with some interest to see what her investigations will reveal. The local electrician, who takes a 50 rupee cess from the ironing wallahs is, apparently, fearless – which means he has almost certainly cut a deal with someone at the power corporation for hassle-free access to free power.
On a serious note, India’s chronic power shortages are partly created by this endemic electricity theft which leaves too many people like my Hindi teacher leading difficult lives, sweating all summer, freezing all winter and reading by candle-light half the time.
In some places more than 50 per cent of power in Delhi is stolen or ‘lost’ to the grid thanks to poor infrastructure – however when I discover these rackets, there is a tiny corner of my heart which admires their entrepreneurial spirit.
As the electrician says with a shrug of his shoulders when confronted by my teacher’s complaints – ‘Hamne ghar chalana hai.’ – literally, “We have to run our house…” but translated in English as “We have to make a living” or “We all have to get by.”
It’s a saying which excuses a lot of the not-strictly-legal – or downright illegal – things that most people do to get by in this country.
I make no judgment on that given that in my privileged position I don’t have to chose between breaking the law and feeding my family.”
Comment:
I remember the power cuts when I was growing up in India. Sometimes they were predictable, sometimes out of the blue.
You wake up pouring sweat in the middle of the night as the ceiling fan clunks to a stop. It’s too hot to sleep, so you spend a couple of hours fanning yourself with a magazine or one of the palm-leaf fans that are ubiquitous.
If the cut starts in the evening, you’re in more trouble. Because if you have homework, then you have to get out the hurricane lantern and study in its flickering light. I remember everyone in the family feeling their way around the dark for the lantern, which was always kept ready in the corner, with matches and candles as a supplement. This happened often during the monsoon season.
It was a race between shutting all the windows to keep the rain from getting through the mosquito netting and getting the lamp and candles out before the current went off.
No time for boredom, ennui, existential angst and the other afflictions of modern man.
Everyone knew that workers (manual laborers, dhobis, coolies etc.) stole electricity, whichever way they could. But there were many others who did too.
There was not too much anyone could do about it, since the policeman took his cut and wasn’t likely to stop them.
Around 25-30% (I wrote 40-50% before, which I’m told is an exaggeration) of electricity in India is stolen in this way. That is gigantic and far more than any other country suffers from theft(China’s transmission losses are 3%).
Most obviously, slum-dwellers steal by running wires from external transmission lines. But there are also middle-class people who tamper with meters and there is widespread theft by businesses, extensive, but hard to gauge.
Total losses to the state (most of the power supply is in the hands of the government) come to around $10 billion a year.
Two private companies, Tata and Reliance (headed by Mukesh Ambani) have begun to supply electricity to Delhi in conjunction with the government and they claim to have cut “transmission losses” (theft) from 50-30%, but there is still a long way to go.
Both Tata (Rothschild affiliated) and Reliance have ties with the state and the global elites, and it’s hard to see this as more than crony capitalism.
The farmers and the politicians always seemed to have enough electricity though.
We’d be studying and cooking in the dark, with candles, while in the town, in the maidan, the pandals would be lit up 24/7 with colored bulbs. Radios blared film music at a level that would puncture your ear-drums and cars jammed up the streets already overcrowded with thousands of pedestrians, bullock-carts, cycles, and rickshaws.
If anyone tried to take away the subsidies, the beneficiaries would make common cause with rivals to stir up trouble. There would be bandhs, strikes, road-blocks, threats of arson or self-immolation. The would-be reformer would back down. The political process in all its gangsterism (“do what we want or else”) shows its face…
The masses of people are illiterate and half-starved but shrewd and tough. They have little to lose and everything to gain through the process. The politicians have every reason to foster poverty, since they benefit from the vote-bank it provides.
The middle-class is too busy trying to survive in a world that demands international standards to enter the market.