Geeta Gouri, Eminent Advisor at Competition Advisory Services, discusses how unbundling in the electricity sector never quite happened, and how the control of this crucial resource stunted the growth of industry in India.
Read the transcript below:
My father was in a private sector power company and over the period we saw the nationalisation till I became involved in the Electricity Regulatory Commission which meant unbundling. Okay. Now in the power sector, what was the problem with the power sector there were tremendous shortages. I don’t know if you knew about it but we’d have eight hours power cuts, there would be a lot of volatility and although there would be some amount of investments that are taking in generation even if generation took place there would be transmission problems and everything was based either on coal, which again was given only by a public sector company, The Coal India, or on dams, which is your hydropower, and dams if there is a bad season, there would be tremendous shortage. And this affected a lot of companies. You know the sick industry issue started coming up by then because lack of power meant that cement was affected, aluminium was affected, paper was affected and it was not only a shortage of power, but it was also a question of the volatility. There would be spikes or there would be very low voltage. And except people were thinking, what was this public sector reform. The lines kept getting extended but not the quality of power and the amount that was being generated was not sufficient at all. And that’s when the process started of looking at it in a different concepts altogether.
Read the complete transcript on our website: [ Ссылка ]
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/be2Iwgoyp2w/maxresdefault.jpg)