Actually load shedding is planned power cuts. I have seen a schedule published in a newspaper with different regions of the city (not Delhi) and times when no electricity will be available. This is for ppl to plan their day
Nowadays, power cuts are announced via SMS in advanced. Before, this was not the case.
Would reconsider if INC appoint someone competent like Shashi Tharoor.
Thankfully, I stayed in a nice hotel with an automatic generator, so the power would cut out for a second or two before the generator came on, and then would cut back out for a second or two a few minutes later when the hotel went back on the mains.
The only thing I know about India is from a Big Bang Theory episode where Raj's father said to Leonard when asked how's the weather, "It's hot, it's always hot in India!".
I can fault India (and, in particular, Modi) for repeating the same mistake all other western developed countries made 40 years before, yes.
made 40 years... before they (India) started developing.
Western countries were at the forefront of this already in the 80s. India, starting to develop much later, had a big time buffer to learn from that and at least attempt to avoid it.
There are 1.2 billion Indians.
(the only remaining places that has not yet dropped below replacement is sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they too are seeing birth rates drop).
You see, I know it's hard to grasp for some, but everything is really relative.
Your ratios are all wrong. There are about 500mm Indians aged 6 to 26 today who will be over 80 (and under 100) by 2100. Even if nobody dies, India isn’t hitting 1.2bn 80-year olds. As for under-18s in that timeline, it ranges from 100 to 500 million depending on fertility.
Put another way, there is no deterministic population collapse in India the way there almost must be in Korea and Germany.
India can adopt plug-in standards, solar and batteries. I guess most people use some form of battery (UPS/Inverter) anyways, so the idea is familiar.
Rooftop is known and it can continue to grow. Next, add vertical solar. This will add ~4 hours of solar production.
Required gated communities to be self sufficient or net producers. Cover the surfaces of all high rises with vertical panels. Require these communities to have BESS and EV charging for all car parking. This adds two layers of storage. BESS instead of diesel generators. Add outlet for induction stove. No need of piped gas. I've seen villa communities where most homes are net producers, these ideas are happening, need to be standardized as regulation. Easiest thing is to create standards for the gated communities, which can be enforced.
Don't build rural transmission infrastructure. They can be offgrid, using solar and batteries. It is not worth the cost to build and maintain transmission and distribution infrastructure to millions of small villages.
Work towards regulating uber/rapido to require EV cars. These drive the most miles in cities and would do wonders.
Lots of scope for growth.
Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.
We do not have issues with electricity here or planned power cuts or whatever else.
I would like to see where this professor got his data for losses from. Maybe his data is flawed.
'kaod' is losses, this table shows losses from bruto production.
Either someone has been sending wrong data to the world bank or there is some issue with interpreting them before importing to world bank.
But at 2.9% according to Eesti's electricity supplier: https://www.elering.ee/en/electricity-consumption-and-genera...
"In 2024, losses accounted for 2.9% of the total amount of electricity supplied to the transmission system." What does it all mean, who knows.
Even if Estonia does have stated electricity distribution loss, it still looks so way out of place in this group of countries by so many criteria. I wonder why not pick Egypt or Libya given that they have the same distribution loss.
Edit: this could be the reason - when you click on "Map" above the graph, for some reason Estonia is one of the blue countries shown on the map. Argentina, Brazil, and Kenya are there too (but not others).
I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.
It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.
You can steal as much as you want. The ones who pay will pay.
You'd be amazed at how most of this sort of thing is not done by the same people you blame for everything.
I mean, it's very low effort to have somebody else do all the work. But you'll never see a self-employed electrician creating an account in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes.
There's usually an incentive to solve this though because this shrinkage, in retail terms, would be handled at the cost of power generated (without any profit margin) whereas if it was sold to a paying customer it'd have a margin built in. If the Greek utilities are allowed to make a profit on that losses line item, that is insane
Until solar panels came to liberate us from the utility overlords.
It is the places where the grid is failing where solar panels indeed liberate you, but not from the utility overlords, but from incompetent and corrupt governance.
(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)
However there's kind of a funny part to it that I read on the last page of New Scientist some years ago. According to that story, Singapore has by far the lowest rate of accidental line cuts - it's a step change to almost zero from the next best country. Apparently there's a worldwide organization that meets to discuss these things. At one meeting the Singaporean engineers presentation was eagerly anticipated but as he was going through his points the engineers from other countries were impatient - they know and do all this! Until he got to his final point: accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence. Hence the difference.
Amazing that places have 50% power loss.
Bill collectors are openly threatened by local elected leaders even in the presence of police.
The state chief minister(similar to a governor) acknowledged the problem and is planning to handover bill collection to a private firm specifically for that part of the city. The opposition is against the move as the area represents a major voting bloc.
Sometimes, policy based solutions work but political will is also necessary to enforce those policies.
This is... interesting on multiple levels.
But yes, transmission losses exist and are surprisingly large
I don't know the real details, but my educated guess is they raised the voltage, and also they used 3x as many wires (running 3 phase past every house even though almost everybody only used 1 phase). That is I can visually see their insulators on the power posts are larger than neighboring utilities which allows for higher voltage (but may or may not mean higher voltages were used). Likewise I can see the 3 lines on each power pole while neighboring utilities only used one. It is hard to tell from the ground but I suspect they used thicker wires as well.
Reducing the number of transformers, raising the high side of system voltage, and increasing conductor sizes are all ways to reduce the transmission losses. of course each of those requires investments so that's why it can be variable and also something to brag about
In the 39 years I live here, the only power loss was due to lightning or planned power cuts because of work in the building where I live in the last 9 years ( rare - twice).
There is however incentive for our high chemistry industry to cut the power and they get re-imbursed. This is when we have too much electricity production ( solar power) vs. consumption. Otherwise the providers have to pay "fines" to lose the overproduction of electricity to neigboring countries ( who probably all have overproduction of electricity).
As of now, we cannot do lossless transmission. If some Ultragrok comes with room-pressure and room-temperature superconductors, then maybe.
But you should also acknowledge that national electrical reform was done by BJP. The real problem for Indian politics was the re-entry of the Gandhi nepo-baby dynasty. We would be a lot better off if they hadn't gotten their claws back into the INC.
I was in Delhi when this started and they began laying out the tamper-proof cable back in the early 2000s. At that time, railway food had been privatised, perhaps you recall. It wasn't better. The problem was not the privatisation or lack thereof, it was the complete lack of accountability.
Part of accountability is the possibility for failure and the associated consequences. PSUs have no fear of failure, since they're fundamentally parasitic, living as they are on the tax receipts of the beleaguered middle class. Private industry either increases efficiency to the point of profit, or goes under, simple as. Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the results!
Of course, if there is complete government capture by industry, then there is no more risk of failure, and you have privatized PSUs. But let's say this, from 1947-1991, India traded the British for the IAS. Hardly much of an improvement. The only way to reduce their power is to transfer it to the private sector, outside of areas where the utility of the activity is all externality (e.g. defense, scientific research). We have to move in this direction or risk returning to the License Raj era. Perhaps this will create more problems, but at least our children won't curse us for leaving them with our parents' problems.
Saw the same thing playing out in public transport in a few different countries, incidentally. London railways are a particularly hilarious example of what happens when you privatise without proper accountability.
Dude, you're the one coming across as a zealot here.
The License Raj prior to 1991 was pretty socialist, and it was a Congress policy.
It baffles me that country still has strong anti-capitalist views. I guess lack of education does that to people.
Also, BJP is slightly right of Congress (post 1991) when it comes to economics.
Anyway, I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of the wealthy and powerful. For instance, I personally quite dislike our new AI ruling class. But unfortunately, in India there was an attitude since independence that it is impossible to generate wealth in a legitimate manner. Which is going way too far! And has predictably bad outcomes for the country.
While the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company was, as a broad generality, not nearly so vile as (say) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_colonization_of_the_Am..., it certainly didn't leave many Indians with a favorable impression of European-style capitalism.
The various East India companies went to India (and the other east Indies) because those places had things rich Europeans desired - spices yes, but also high-end, high-quality textiles and handcrafted items. They were already the height of civilization and had high economic productivity.
> would do well to imagine the counterfactual of what India would be like had Europe never visited
It would probably not be one country. Best case scenario: like a South Asian EU. Why do you think they wouldn't have copied European industrialization and developed themselves? Japan did it. Turkey did it.
Speaking of Japan, isn't it interesting that the first Asian country to industrialize is also one of the only Asian countries never colonized by Europeans? Why do people still believe colonization was good for economic development?
IIR, Japan was a pretty xenophobic, unified, and militarized place when the Europeans showed up. And without either reputed or obvious Tier 1 riches - such as Central & South America's precious metals - to motivate a hard-fought conquest. Especially when 'most everywhere else in South & East Asia was comparatively easy pickings.
> Why do people still believe ...
Because, if you use sufficiently Eurocentric metrics, it usually was. And picking those metrics feels pretty good, if you identify uncomfortably closely with that sort of capitalism.
Other than unified, that describes most places in the 15th or 16th century.
> Because, if you use sufficiently Eurocentric metrics, it usually was.
The one country in Asia* to not suffer colonialism (Japan) is way ahead of all the others that did have it, especially on "Eurocentric" metrics such as GDP and productivity and democracy and human rights. That alone should be a rebuke to colonialism's purported development powers.
* Arguably Thailand is another but it was forced to cede land to colonial powers. It too is considerably richer than its immediate neighbors.
Not sure what you are suggesting here.
How so?
> if you take the ancient Greeks as your yardstick
You mean the slave owners? Who only allowed free men to vote? And required property ownership to hold office?
I'm not aware of widespread slavery in India, nor a requirement to own property to hold public office. Women are allowed to vote there. They've even had a woman be Prime Minister and two women Presidents.
I wouldn't call the "license raj" of India as anti-capitalist. India arguably has the strongest of institutions of all the countries in South Asia. However, even its institutions and regulations are pathetically weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
You probably also saw a previous post right here on this orange website when someone tried to repatriate their business money outside of India. It was painful just to read that they had to get approvals from iirc sixteen different government agencies to get their own money that they brought in from outside of India back. Not profits, not proceeds, a fraction of what they put in.
Neither of these two cases is due to "anti-capitalist" views of India. If you look at what was India before Moghul rule and British rule, you could argue India has never been socialist before.
I think workers everywhere should have "strong anti-capitalist views", because unrestrained capitalism is just anarchy.
The problem with Indian institutions is that they are far too powerful, centralized and bureaucratic. Just read the article - the problem was created by a lazy, corrupt, powerful and centralized bureaucratic system. The solution was to dismantle it and decentralize power.
> I think that's a bad read of Indian institutions. They are incredibly powerful - in fact, they are far too powerful. That's the problem. The license raj is the epitome of authoritarian, centralized political and economic power. I suppose it was justified on socialist grounds, but it would be fair to say that saying so doesn't make it so! Before 91, nothing, and I mean nothing, could happen without government say-so. > The problem with Indian institutions is that they are far too powerful, centralized and bureaucratic. Just read the article - the problem was created by a lazy, corrupt, powerful and centralized bureaucratic system. The solution was to dismantle it and decentralize power.
What you are saying is absolutely true. the bureaucracy in India is absolutely lazy, corrupt, powerful, and centralized. It is also arguably one of the biggest reasons why India has never had a (successful) military coup. You could even argue the inefficiency and the sluggishness of the bureaucracy is a feature and not a defect.