Protecting Power: The Politics of Partial Reforms in Punjab's Electricity Sector (original) (raw)
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Political Economy of Distribution Reforms In Indian Electricity
Despite sustained efforts to reform the sector, electricity distribution in India remains amidst complex problems, manifested in the form of loss-making distribution utilities, poor quality of service, governance ambiguities, and absence of basic data. The current wave of reforms seeks to turnaround the sector’s performance by transforming the generation mix, strengthening the network infrastructure, ensuring universal access and better consumer experience, and financial revival of discoms. While policy signals from the centre appear to be promising and ambitious, given the past records, execution of these reform plans at the state level is uncertain. Against this backdrop, the paper analyses the distribution reform initiated from the centre and the role played by the central government in shaping ideas and stimulating change at the state level. Looking into various diagnoses of the challenges and subsequent reform initiatives, the paper seeks to explain the political economy of successive reform attempts and their outcomes. It also identifies gaps in the current wave of reforms and raises questions for further exploration.
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.
Despite phenomenal growth in power availability, Madhya Pradesh continues to struggle with high-level energy poverty. Two decades after the state-initiated distribution reforms, the power utilities are still grappling with past problems. Institutional restructuring, which unfolded over 11 years, resulted in a complex institutional architecture that provides the state government with systematic control over the sector. By prioritizing an increase in the amount of power available, the state has undermined access and affordability and thus reinstated an economic divide in society. On the operational side, the utilities still face high losses and poor billing and collection, which results in high dependency on the state government for bailouts. Against this backdrop, this paper for the Mapping Power project analyses the power sector reform trajectory in the state to examine policy choices and outcomes. It also looks at the political-economic drivers for these policy choices and how they deviate from or comply with signals from India’s central government. Drawing on the findings, the paper seeks to explain the limits of generation bias and state allocation, and examine how intensive institutional restructuring has resulted in consolidated state control over the sector. Finally, it analyses the implications of past experiences and the prevailing context for ongoing and future reforms.
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
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.
Insulated Wires: The Precarious Rise of West Bengal's Power Sector
Working Paper, Mapping Power Project, 2017
The trajectory of Bengal’s power sector since 2000 has been one of the most unusual and periodically encouraging of any Indian State. Under the centralized one-party dominance of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), it developed a technocratic, pragmatic and statist model of power reforms in the hope of incentivizing industrialization. Rather than relying on restructuring or civil society activism, this model focused on internal changes—corporate governance, capacity building, and technology-aided process streamlining—to bolster the independence of the utilities. Until around 2011 it enjoyed impressive successes. Yet, even while improved power performance was popular, the overall pro-industrial tilt came at the cost of public support. With the ensuing change of government, performance began to stagnate. Faced with fierce party-political competition for its non-elite voter base, and operating with a less cohesive organizational structure, in its first term (2011-16) the Trinamool Congress struggled to preserve the new norm of political non-interference in the sector. Nonetheless, Bengal continues to outperform many other States thanks to its innovative approach to building institutional resilience, and having been re-elected the government once again hopes that quality electricity will heighten its appeal to industrial investors. The Bengal power sector thus offers a lens on the promise and limits of the technocratic, internally focused model of power reform, as well as the effects of (the absence of) party-political competition on the power sector.