A Crippling Shortage

At this time every year, Indian farmers begin to eye their sun-scorched fields and await the life-giving monsoon rains of June and July. After two years of below-normal precipitation, manufacturers and power-plant managers are waiting for the rain just as anxiously. Only a heavy monsoon can help to alleviate the crippling shortage of electric power that is aggravating India's many industrial and agricultural agonies.

Hydroelectric plants generate 40% of India's electricity, but they are running slowly now. Last winter's rain was low, and snow fell only lightly in the Himalayas, where the great rivers of north India swell. The flow in those rivers is now down to a trickle. Nor can coal-fired generators take up the slack. Plagued with their own problems, including limited fuel supplies, they are not working at full capacity. At present sky-high prices, India also cannot afford to import as much oil as it needs to operate the supplementary plants that power individual factories. So the country faces power shortages that promise to be even worse than those that cost its industry $1 billion in lost production last year.

Of India's 21 states, only three enjoy a surplus of power. Eight make do, and the other ten are in serious trouble. The state of Haryana is hardest hit; it has no generating capacity of its own, and since last year has been forced to reduce its power consumption by a total of 60%. Between Feb. 1 and March 30, power was shut off completely 19 times in Haryana's Faridabad industrial township, causing layoffs of 60,000 workers at a time; layoffs in the entire state totaled 200,000. Haryana industrialists fear outbreaks of violence among unemployed workers, who have considerable reason for feeling frustration. They are trying to cope with a 21% inflation rate on the 50% of normal wages that they get while on layoff.

In Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, the outlook is hardly brighter. The 300-megawatt Rihand dam has been closed by water shortages; last month, power was cut by 40% throughout the state. Electric steel furnaces until last week were allowed no power at all and had to shut down completely. In the city of Ghaziabad, other industries are allowed power to operate only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. That move saves power for domestic and office use during the day, but it automatically idles 15% of the factory work force of 70,000, since women are forbidden by law to work after 7 p.m.

Idle Pumps. The most threatening effect of the power shortage is on agriculture. This year, the combination of drought and fertilizer shortages is likely to hold India's grain harvest low enough to cause near famine; the power scarcity worsens the situation by making electric irrigation pumps all but useless. In Punjab state, wealthy farmers had purchased diesel pumps to use when the electric pumps failed, but the oil troubles have made diesel fuel scarce too. Gas stations selling diesel fuel have to be protected by policemen from mobs of farmers who wait for days for tank trucks to arrive and then storm the pumps. Some trucks have been waylaid on back roads by farmers who drained the trucks and then paid for the fuel.

Even a heavy monsoon would not end the power shortages. If India's generators ran at full capacity, they still could not supply all the electricity the nation needs. The architects of India's five-year plans have encouraged an unbalanced industrial development; in the past five years, demand for electricity grew by 70%, but generating capacity increased only 30%. Providing adequate power for a country that is expected to almost double its population by the year 2000 is at present a problem without a solution.

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