The new Special Assistant to Prime Minister (SAPM) on Power, Tabish Gauhar, has recently made public his roadmap for resolving the major issues of the country’s power sector. It’s a welcome step asit reflects his keen and objectivedesire towards handling these serious issues. His insight and grasp on these issues and his ideas to resolve them also come as a breath of fresh air as the nation has been getting tired of hearing the oft-repeated and run-of-the-mill solutions focusing mainly on reducing losses and improving revenue recovery in the DISCOs. While one can dispute his suggested remedies here and there, as we do in the ensuing discussion, all in all, his approach to reform the power sector looks sound, bold, and “out of the box”. Though it comes somewhat belatedly as the government is half way through its present tenure, but as we all know, it’s never too late.
Let’s be clear at the outset. A roadmap isn’t a plan. A plan, particularly a strategic one, generally takes stock of the existing situation, defines where we intend to go, devises strategies to reach there, and lays out a roadmap with clearly defined guideposts and milestones along the way to avoid diversions and keep on track. Such a vision may have been on SAPM’s mind, and would have been nice if he had translated it into a concrete and documented plan for everyone to be clear about what the government intends to accomplish and also keep track of the progress. Hoping that a set of disjointed initiativeswill fall in place like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle may just be idealistic. A clear, concrete, and cohesive plan, developed with a painstaking effort and considering all the potential intended and unintended consequences,was necessary, but perhaps wasnot considered so.
While the suggested remedies by the SAPM are reasonable as well as promising, they seem to be targeting mostly the outward symptoms of the crisis and miss out on some important causes which have been at the root of the present power sector crisis. These include myopic leadership, institutional dysfunction, and managerial incompetence. His roadmap also seems to focus on inefficiency in the DISCOs only and ignores that in some other equally critical components of the power supply and delivery chain like that in generation and system operation, also overlooking the lack of responsiveness and agility in the management and workforce of the existing entities and their outdated administrative practices and procedures.
