Power Up

"Knowledge is power." ~ Sir Francis Bacon

This year, Bombay escaped what could have been its worst nightmare in a long time. Already suffering from bad roads, erratic water supply and inefficient public service, citizens of Bombay were facing a new problem, load shedding. Something that was unheard of in living memory. What is load shedding? It is this. Power supply companies cut off power to certain areas at specific times during the week so as to be able to supply to other areas in case of a shortfall in supply. Bombay was already facing a shortfall of 200 MW in its supply and in summer this was going to exceed beyond 400 MW as the temperatures began to soar. Load shedding had never taken place in Bombay in the last 30 years.

Bombay prides itself on the uninterrupted electricity supply it receives. Bombay is insulated from the National grid by a system known as islanding. In other words it has its own grid. This electricity is made available from power stations such as the Tarapur nuclear power station at Trombay. So even as the National grid faces a perennial shortfall, Bombay is supplied electricity round the clock. This is something that has not been done for any other city in India.

With such a system in place, consenting to load shedding would have been a political harakiri for the ruling Democratic Front government in the state. So for now the city has been saved from load shedding with the Union Power Minister, Sushilkumar Shinde agreeing to make available additional power to Bombay to meet its shortfall.

But there are larger issues to look at here. The issue of theft during transmission, is one. Since electricity cannot be stored, it has to be distributed. Many slum pockets have resorted to stealing electricity from the main lines. Many also indulge in meter tampering. Since then they don't have to pay for the extra electricity that they steal they use it indiscriminately. A large populations use ACs and refrigerators at their cooling limits. This draws a lot of electricity. If they understand that they could do with a little less cooling and use fans instead of Air Conditioners, this could save a lot of electricity.

The problem is awareness and compliance with power saving guidelines. Many power distribution companies abroad have issued prepaid electricity cards. This works like any mobile refill card. Only difference is, if you shoot the limit for the month, you have to pay a lot more for the extra power that you might need. Also if you save electricity then you could get discounts too. This will also allow consumers to keep a tab on their electricity usage. More than that this will allow companies to carefully map out consumption patterns. Also they could have advisors on board who could visit high consumption households and help them plan their electricity usage and bring their consumption down, which in turn is also good for the households as less consumption means lower bills and more savings. Companies could also tie up with manufacturers of CFL lights and reduce the cost to the consumers who should be encouraged to switch to CFL lights by creating awareness about how they will ultimately reduce electricity consumption even though they are expensive to buy.

But what about government offices? They are probably the biggest thefts of electricity as they use it as if free electricity is their birthright. Quite a lot of electricity gets wasted because our friendly neighbourhood government servants don't give a fuck to power saving, as part of their usual apathetic ways. So what do we do with them? Issue prepaid cards to government offices too. And make available complete information on their usage to the general public. So people who are asked by the government to save power, can catch the government which itself indulges in power wastage. If they do not comply, citizens can then use the Right to Information Act, 2005 to demand a complete report on how electricity is used and what measures are being adopted to reduce consumption. This will be reflected in the usage report, so citizens can catch them if they supply false information.

And what has this blogger done to save electricity? Well, my folks replaced the two bulbs in my house with CFL lamps. Also I have reduced the time spent on my computer. Earlier I used to leave my computer idle while it downloaded movies, but now I continue those downloads only when I am working on the computer. Also I switch off my monitor whenever I am away from my comp. Also, now I check mails on my cell phone. So I don't have to turn on my comp just to check mails.

I am doing my bit to keep Bombay lit up. You should save power too, no matter where you stay.

D-10 About this Blog

I know it has been a long time since I blogged. I have been busy, but that cannot be used as an excuse. Actually I had a block, so I was quite irritated. But as it has been in the past, whenever I've had such blocks, I have turned to my detour posts. So I have, even now.

I remember having a post called 'About Me' a while back. Continuing on the same lines, this post is about this blog. And since I believe blogs are an extension of the personality of the blogger, they reveal something more about the blogger than what meets the eye.

The first thing you notice when you look at the blog, is of course the colours. Black, blue and the light brown colour for the background of the posts. Well, blue has always been my favourite colour. Also, for some reason or the other, blue has always been associated with India. For eg, the Indian cricket team(which is a bunch of whiners anyway) sports the colour blue on its one-day internationals outfits. The dark blue colour is also easy on the eyes and is subtle and to me seems to suggest humility, I don't know why though. That is how I like to be too, humble.

The background of the About Me part is black. Why? Because it is not visible immediately when someone firsts looks at the blog. I made it black, because I want to suggest that it is not the blogger that is important, but the blog. Humility, again.

I don't blog to please anybody, and to preclude hypocrisy, I don't expect people who might comment on my blog to please me either. So I allow anything and everything to be written in the comments. In fact, I look forward to criticism. So anyone reading this, can blast me for anything I write, I allow everything.

In particular, I hate things like Ad Sense, so you won't find things like ads popping up on my blog.

But I believe the most striking thing about my blog is the title of my blog. It's kind of cool, I think, and I am quite proud of it. There is a small story behind how I came up with it. A few years ago, I was watching a programme on AXN called 'The Amazing Race'. The participants were on their Indian leg of the race and when the first team arrived in India, Delhi to be more specific, and the anchor, in the voice-over, introduced India saying '...India can best be described as an organized chaos'. That description of my country immediately stuck. "So this is how the world looks at India", I thought.

Well, it is not entirely without a reason. And it is quite true to some extent. But India is lot more than that. I blog about Indian success stories along with issues and challenges that the country faces. So anyone from any part of the world who reads this blog, will look at India a bit differently than he did before. If my blog manages to do even that, than I'd say, purpose served.

Have fun!

People Still Vote

My second year in college is officially out. Today we received our progress cards for the academic year 2006-07. I am proud to announce to the entire world that yours truly has scored 87% in the final semester exam. I had to score high marks in this exam because of the debacle in the first semester exam where I scored a poor 64%. The average for the entire year works around to be roughly a decent 76%. I am not too happy about it, but I am satisfied. But the hunger has grown and I want more marks in the coming exams.

One more piece of news. I cleared the exam for the Business Awareness Module course which I took in February. Though the Actuarial Society of India does not publish marks, I am sure I did well. I am relieved that I will not have to reappear for that exam as it is a real pain in the ass. Not that I hate it though.

Coming to the issue at hand, the ongoing polls in the state of Uttar Pradesh are nothing less than a circus. India's most populated state with 26% of the country's population(could easily be among the top ten if it were a country), is hardly an example to showcase the famed democracy that this country prides itself upon. Yesterday, CNN-IBN, carried an expose that showed videos of candidates from various political outfits offering to do almost anyhting in return for a fat sum of money.

Sample this.

One said he would throw tomatoes at the speaker of the house for money. Another was saying most the officials including the high-ranking IAS officers such as District Magistrates have been paid 50 lakhs to 1 crore. There was another boasting that he could arrange fake encounters and still another claiming he is the 'king of horse-trading'.

This is what it has come down to. The Indian electoral process is not about the usual issues like sadak-bijli-paani anymore. Who needs them when you can divide the electorate among caste and communal lines? When you can figure out how to woo the minorities? When you can relegate law and order to the dust bin and present fudged crime rate figures? When you can have advertisements that project leaders as Godmen? Or when you can shamelessly agree to have an alliance with one party in the state, have an alliance with a rival party at the centre and still all three be very comfortable with it? Or still, when you can promise free electricity, free education, especially when you know that there are half a day power cuts across the state and most schools are just four dilapidated walls? All this to have control over the cow-belt where the system has the ignominy of being a slave to the politician-criminal-corrupt bureaucrat nexus.

But people still vote. Under the umbrella of the tight security provided by the Election Commission and looked after by its returning officers. Is it not an irony that the freedom that makes this country the largest democracy in the world comes at the price of risking your lives in the ugly mess that is called elections? They do it to select their 'representative' from a list of people, among whom, they know, not a single is worth it. When they know not a single rascal can be of any use to their needs for employment, development and law enforcement, and he is not going to be any better than the earlier rascal. At a cost that amounts to thousands of crores to the exchequer.

But people still vote. And hope. Hope is what drives democracy. But this hope to choose betrays us, we just choose to hope.