Collapse of northern grid: a wake-up call

As this issue of TERI Newswire goes to press, the entire northern grid has suffered a major collapse, plunging all of northern India into one of the worst power breakdowns in recent years. The government has set up a committee to inquire into the factors behind this failure and the means by which such occurrences can be prevented in the future. The breakdown is, however, symptomatic of a much larger problem, for which solutions are difficult and likely to be time consuming. The committee that would go into this specific episode can, therefore, at best provide some directions for first aid, but this malady requires a series of surgical procedures. The power sector in India has been suffering for much too long from inadequate levels of investment not only in power generation but also in the transmission and the distribution segments. The system hardly has any reserves of capacity or redundancies in the transmission system. This is compounded with the problem of lack of grid discipline. Hence, if a failure takes place in any part of a power system in the country, the likelihood of a series of failures becomes very high. Something of this nature apparently happened in the collapse of the northern grid on 2 January. The state of disrepair of power plants, transmission infrastructure, and distribution lines, including thousands of transformers, requires major investments and superior management. Much has been done to bring into position independent regulatory bodies to regulate power sector decisions and operations, but these bodies need to be equipped with adequate knowledge, considerable freedom of action, and resources of various kinds to make them effective. Some states have moved faster than others, but the process of reform in the sector as a whole needs to be accelerated. Also overdue are measures to privatize distribution, so that collection of revenues and management of supply at the consumer end reaches acceptable levels of efficiency and effectiveness. The aim should be for all the electric utilities in the country to reach financial viability in their operations within the next three to five years, and the Ministry of Power can initiate a process whereby each state works out specific plans for reaching this goal. If the financial bankruptcy of the power sector continues as before, perhaps, the breakdown of 2 January would be followed by several such crises in the future.