In Conversation With Kashmiris on Electricity

The following dialogue is an interview conducted by Rei Publicae in Kashmir to find the ground reality of electricity. A basic amenity which they are so deprived of that has lead to strikes, protests and is also a huge factor in Kashmir’s resistance against India. The interview has 2 sets; the first dialogue is between the general manager of the power grid corporation of India Ltd. and the second is with a common Kashmiri engineering student. These sets were created to find the clashes that lie between the official reports and the ground reality.

Q1) Sir could you state your name and current position for the record? OFFICIAL - Arshad Hussain Khan General, Manager of the power grid corporation of India limited

COMMON KASHMIRI - My name is Amjad Malik, MBA in project engineering management Q2) Is there a problem of power shortage in Kashmir? OFFICIAL - The question you asked me has such a long answer that I could sit here for the rest of the day and discuss it with you. Power is such a big problem that it is also one of the factors that drive this rebellion against India, like how the youth says that “India is stealing our power and leaving us with nothing”. The truth is that Kashmir is a power surplus state, not an industrialised one. The demand is quite low and the production is comparatively high but the problem is with local bodies that have been given the duty to distribute the power directly to the consumers, the grid here is like a storage. We supply to the distributing bodies. Those bodies for the record are not under the national government but under the state government. The main problem lies there.

Amjad - Yes, there is. Q3) Sir so now that you have established that there is something wrong, where does the problem lie? OFFICIAL - There are a wide variety of problems like; high power thefts/illegal uses/unregistered consumers, uncontrolled and unaccounted consumption of power, lesser load agreements, low tariff rates, and poor collection efficiency. See, it is the duty of the government to ensure the supply of power, but it is also the obligation of the people to pay for power

Amjad - See Kashmir is not a state that is deprived of resources, it has numerous resources but the problem is on paper. The government officials show that Kashmir is a power surplus region but the reality differs. I mean, look at the headlines of newspapers each year, they would read out that “Kashmir experienced power shortage 408MW”, and the funny thing is that the power supplied to Delhi is mainly from Kashmir but the power demand here is not being fulfilled but instead being deprived of. Instead of first meeting the requirements of the state’s demands, they are supplying the electricity to other states leaving us with nothing. Q4) Okay so tell us how often does light go off and how do you cope up with it? Amjad - Like they give electricity for 3, sometimes 2 hours and then take it for 3 hours that’s the cycle every day. There is no fixed pattern. Some days they’ll give power for the whole day and the following 2-3 days power is nowhere, and even in the 2-3 hours of light that they give there is not a constant flow of electricity it’s like on and off, it comes and goes.

And talking about coping, almost every household in Kashmir that can afford has an inverter or generator but certainly, most households cannot do so. Q5) So do you think Kashmir is a power surplus state? OFFICIAL - Power surplus? I mean if the officials state that Kashmir is power surplus shouldn’t there be like an overflow of electricity but that is far from the truth I mean they cannot give electricity the whole day and they call kashmir power surplus. (The Kashmiri administration claims that Kashmir is a power surplus region meaning that they produce more electricity than required.) Q6) So sir are the people at fault? OFFICIAL - Yes to some extent, even they are people don’t pay bills and this might sound funny but the gap between power purchase and actual revenue realisation cannot be allowed to continue. Q7) What do you think about the official's statements? Amjad - See what they said about people not paying their bills, that’s not the crux of the problem. There will always be some people that don’t pay their bills, you cannot simply state that these few people are the reason for this misery because that’s just absurd. The problem lies in the procurement process like the government should have given the state primary priority, first, the demands should have been fulfilled in Kashmir, then the power should be supplied to other states. There is no firm administration that has taken up this matter properly like I have lived here for the past 20 years I have seen many governments come and go but the ground situation is the same even if on record they state that they have achieved miracles. ----X----

While the official and the common man might have agreed on one thing that there exists a problem of electricity in the region of Kashmir, it was almost impossible to find another common ground in their statements. While one states that it is the people who're not paying the electricity bills are at fault, the other differs by saying that the administration is only capable of 'achieving miracles on paper and not on the ground'. There can be many statements by the officials stating that Kashmir is a power surplus state but the when reality is examined, it is found that the so called "power-surplus" region cannot even provide electricity for half of the day. Now, it is for us to decide who to believe - the officials or the Kashmiris. While we may think of this as a trivial problem, this indeed has ignited the anti-India movement in the valley. What we're looking at is much larger and much more important than we can think of.

Finally, we're stuck with 2 questions in our mind:

Has the government really worked a miracle by making Kashmir a power-surplus region?

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Who is to blame - the people or the officials? We encourage you all to not only look at the problems but also try to figure out the solutions, if any for improving the conditions of the Kashmir region. The problem of electricity is one amongst the innumerable more problems that hinder the daily life of common people