Insulated Wires: The Precarious Rise of West Bengal's Power Sector (original) (raw)
Related papers
Power-Hungry: The State and the Troubled Transition in Indian Electricity
Indian Capitalism in Development, ed. Barbara Harriss-White and Judith Heyer, 2014
India’s pre-liberalization power policy was characterized by vast subsidies for irrigated agriculture, widespread theft, scarcity, and underinvestment. With regional variations, this description also fits the contemporary power sector. Electricity is critical for capital accumulation – making its comparative neglect in the study of development all the more egregious – and we would intuitively expect India’s contemporary pro-business state to alter policy to benefit ‘India Inc’. The power sector was indeed one of the first selected for reform in 1991, yet the pro-business policy transition has substantially failed. What can this failure tell us about the contemporary Indian state and its relationship with capitalist development?
Power Politics: Process of Power Sector Reform in India
2001
Power sector policy in India appears to have locked itself into adverse arrangements at least twice in the recent period. The first was when agricultural consumption was de-metered and extensive subsidies were offered; the second when Independent Power Producer contracts with major fiscal implications were signed by the State Electricity Boards. A third set of circumstances, with the potential for equally powerful forms of institutional lock-in, appears to be in the making with the reproduction of the Orissa model on the national scale. This paper provides an analysis of the social and political context in which power sector reforms have taken place in India. While a state-led power sector has been responsible for substantial failures, is the design of the reformed sector tell aimed at balancing efficiency andprofit-making on the one hand and the public interest on the other? The discussion of the forces and actors that have shaped the reform processes is intended to contribute to an understanding of how the public interest can best be served in the ongoing effort to reshape the power sector.
Distinctively Dysfunctional: State Capitalism 2.0 and the Indian Power Sector
Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles: New Perspectives on the Indian State, ed. Anthony D'Costa and Achin Chakraborty
State intervention in India has persisted but has proved far from immune to critiques of traditional dirigisme. An examination of the power sector shows that waves of reforms since 1991 have together created a hybrid and regionally differentiated state-market system. Blurring the public-private boundary, this reinvented “state capitalism 2.0” displays both refurbished modes of intervention and new governance arrangements with private players. Nonetheless, as the power sector’s continually dismal condition suggests, this state-capitalist hybrid has not (yet) provided a coherent alternative to older dirigisme or the Anglo-American mode of “deregulatory” liberalization. Instead, between 1991 and 2014 its ad hoc, layered emergence generated distinctive forms of dysfunction. Coupled with competitive politics, its ever-increasing institutional complexity rendered it internally incoherent and vulnerable to rent seeking on multiple fronts. Power sector evidence suggests that state intervention in India has remained simultaneously indispensable and dogged by persistent administrative and financial difficulties. Examining its internal institutional transformations helps to explain the apparently contradictory nature of the contemporary Indian state: at once business-friendly, populist, and often underperforming. For the complete volume, see https://www.springer.com/in/book/9789811368905
The politics of power sector reform in India
This paper was written as part of a collaborative project on power sector reform and public benefits in developing and transition economies coordinated by the World Resources Institute. For further information contact Navroz K. Dubash at navrozd@wri.org and Lily Donge at lilyd@wri.org Navroz K. Dubash (navrozd@wri.org) is a Senior Associate with the World Resources Institute. Sudhir Chella Rajan (crajan@tellus.org) worked on this paper as an independent consultant, and is currently with the Tellus Institute.
The Politics of Electricity Reform
World Development, 2018
Across many developing countries, the power sector persistently underperforms despite years of market reform efforts. India, where de facto responsibility for the power sector rests with subnational (state) governments, provides a useful laboratory to examine why. The state of West Bengal provides an example of public sector reform as an alternative to the so-called " World Bank template " for electricity liberalization, and a lens on the political preconditions for reform success. Drawing on 30 elite interviews in 2016 alongside comparative evidence from other Indian states, this article documents the reform design and assesses its success. West Bengal's reforms aimed at internally strengthening the utility against political interference. The study finds that this reform model delivered initial performance among the best of any Indian utility, and that successful reforms in several other states were also more statist than often recognized. However, longer-term sustainability remains challenging. While weak rural lobbies had some effect, the study explains this trajectory as the result of the transition from one-party dominance to intensified party-political competition, a finding that resonates with evidence from other Indian states. In contrast to influential political theories developed in the Global North, this suggests that party-political competition does not make Indian politicians more likely to deliver public services, but rather leads to short-termism and political capture of utilities. Conversely, under some conditions one-party dominance can encourage longer-term reforms. The study thus assesses the promise and limits of public sector reforms as an alternative to liberalization, and suggests how electoral competition can influence development priorities in Indian states.
Vested interests: Examining the political obstacles to power sector reform in twenty Indian states
Energy Research & Social Science, 2020
Why do power sector reform succeed and fail in democratic contexts? We conduct comparative case studies of these reforms in the largest 20 Indian states. These states have responded to India's electricity generation, transmission, and distribution crises in different ways. Similar to conventional case studies, our research design has the virtue of allowing us to explore historical processes. However, having a large number of cases also enables us to consider multiple causal factors at the same time. Both the findings and non-findings speak to the broad debate on the possible causes of reform failure. We find support for hypotheses emphasizing electoral opportunism and the politics of interest group (organized labor, agricultural interests). In contrast, partisan cleavages do not seem to explain reform failure. These findings offer new insights into politically feasible reform strategies for India.
A Collection of Insights on the Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States
2019
The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) has been one of India's leading public policy think tanks since 1973. The Centre is a non-profit, non-partisan independent institution dedicated to conducting research that contributes to the production of high quality scholarship, better policies, and a more robust public discourse about the structures and processes that shape life in India. CPR Initiative on Climate, Energy, and Environment's (ICEE) main objectives are to understand and interpret the global climate change regime and to stimulate and inform a strategic and sectoral debate around India's energy future focusing on the buildings and electricity sectors. ICEE's aim is also to operationalize, implement, and promote, an integrated approach to climate and development and to analyse key issues of domestic environmental law, governance, and regulation, and in particular, consider institutional capacities for strategic environmental governance. RAP raponline.org The Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) is an independent, non-partisan, non-governmental organization dedicated to accelerating the transition to a clean, reliable, and efficient energy future. Our team focuses on the world's four largest power markets, responsible for half of all power generation: China, Europe, India, and the United States.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
India has a decade-long experience with independent regulatory agencies in public services as an institutional transplant from the industrialized world. Introduced at the behest of international donor agencies, regulators in India are intended, somewhat naively, to provide an apolitical space for decision making to assuage investor concerns over arbitrary administrative actions, and thereby stimulate private investment. In practice, regulators have had to negotiate a terrain over which the state has continued to exercise considerable control. Regulators have also been been shaped in their functioning by national and sub-national political traditions and by administrative and political practices. The result is a hybrid institutional form that combines politics as usual with intriguing new, and unanticipated, opportunities for political intervention.
Protecting Power: The Politics of Partial Reforms in Punjab's Electricity Sector
By achieving the longstanding national aspiration of universal access and recording a per capita consumption of nearly double the national average, Punjab’s power sector appears to be a successful case of electrical development. Despite good performance in loss reduction and collection efficiency, both factors that ail many electricity utilities in India, Punjab’s only distribution utility is still grappling with financial loss and a high debt almost equal to one year’s revenue requirement. The state has been in the news for extending free power, which increases the subsidy burden on the state economy. The state has recently joined the bandwagon of the UDAY (“Dawn”) electrification plan in an effort to turn around the finances of the distribution company. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to understand how the sector has evolved over more than a decade of reforms. It analyses the developments around power sector reforms in Punjab, with the objective to examine the policy choices and outcomes and identify the winners and losers at the state level. It also analyses the political-economic drivers for these policy choices and how they deviate from or comply with the signals from the Centre. Drawing on the findings, the paper explains the futility of unsolicited populism, the limits of the Centre’s push for reforms, and how the state has managed to sustain the power dynamics in the sector through skin-deep reforms and minimal institutional restructuring. Finally, it analyses the implications of past experiences and prevailing power dynamics for ongoing and future reforms.