Power cuts and the Nuclear Deal

Tick, I turned on the lights of my room, another tick I turned the regulator of the ceiling fan. Nothing worked.

“Aren’t there lights at our place dude?” I asked my friend.
“Nope, Load shedding…” he said.
“How long?”
“It’s in the papers, six hours a day… 3 in the morning and 3 later in the evening…”
“Gosh!! Damn, these power cuts!!”

I went back to my bed, slept for another 4 hours. Woke up, it was noon, no electricity yet. It was another weekend, and what a way to start it. I hoped power would resume services soon, just with the pace of my thought. Like in an instant second, something that would drive the laziness off me and get me moving. Done with standard daily chores, I flipped the newspapers only to re-read the same lines that my friend said to me. More load shedding.

But something else was also filling the newspapers other than Page 3 stuff, IPL and bollywood. The nation was busy debating another power issue. Left, right or wrong, we seem to clear all the hurdles in the way. Even before, I had written about this on my blog.

I see this as a great break through in securing India’s energy needs, especially when oil getting slippery to hold on to and natural resources scarce. To some manageable extent India can think of other sources like solar, wind etc for power generation, but still would be too little and too late. To me, Dr. Manmohan Singh’s leadership in holding on peace and securing the deal symbolizes many a things. Today, I see him more as a visionary, a risk taker and a clever politician (not many are) apart from an exceptional economist. For a developing country like India, securing energy needs is the most important way of ensuring a sustained development journey. Especially at a stage when we can plan of double digit growth figures.

Looking at the way inflation’s chewing up the nation, this deal does signify one aspect that we need not bother about rising oil prices in the future as much as we do it now. Of course, there shall be concerns, but by and large the impact does get reduced to a large extent. Of course, conventional means of power generation shall co-exist and shall still form a major chunk of suppliers. The government itself projects to achieve 25% of power generation through nuclear energy, so the rest shall definitely be through coal and hydro powered generating stations.

In the coming decades, I can now foresee lesser (or no) power cuts and effective and efficient power distribution across the nation. There can be better distribution to places which are situated far off from any form of power generating resource. That’s actually a binding constraint as those situated far off often suffer from transmission losses.

During the IAEA discussions, it was seen that China too had no issues with the deal, although may be reluctantly because they too understand the necessity of meeting energy demands in the future.

Political parties may be supporting or opposing the deal due to political inclinations. I remember seeing in one of the news channels a couple of months back that many of our beloved politicians didn’t even know about the deal. One may find silly, but obviously expectable. It was seen during the trust vote that the nuke deal (for which the Left pulled the plug) didn’t make an issue at all. People played their own music for the evening, thankfully to sustain the deal. Whatever the dirty games might have gone behind the scenes (rather in front of the camera), I am pretty content that the deal is alive. Now that we head for the NSG meet and the US Congress ratification, I am extremely hopeful that the deal comes into operation as soon as possible. Remember, it took 3 years to realize the same. It was in 2005, that Dr. Singh and Bush had spoken about it while he visited The White House.