Public Utilities, Private Angst

Public Utilities, Private Angst

Ganga Prasad G. Rao
http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar

When I was young, India was very much a poor country. Though many industries dotted the country, the Government was by far the primary provider of many essentials of living – electricity, water, kerosene, buses, even milk. Things have changed and changed a lot. Yet, the past continues to hold on to the present, and I am afraid, the future too. While the private sector has grown by leaps and bounds, the Government, especially the local administration and public utilities, continue in their moribund traditions of inefficiency and gargantuan waste. Consider drinking water. Practically every city and town has a public water supply network maintained by the Corporation or the Municipality. Crores were invested in building it; crores are spent renovating and maintaining it, yet, when it comes to using it, many residents back away and rely instead on packaged or bottled water. Those who don't, often use a purifier at home to process the piped water for consumption. In the height of water shortage in 2002 summer, practically every other household in Chennai invested up to Rs30,000 to drill borewells when it would have been optimal to hook the water supply network to a community borewell locally and purchase packaged water for drinking purposes. Consider this. A new water purification plant has just come on stream to supply water to Chennaites. I don't have the estimates, but it cost quite a bundle. But water is pumped at such low pressures that almost all residences have attached a hand pump to the pipe. A hand pump that is open to all worms, frogs and denizens of the dark. Many a times, water must be poured in to the pump to create a water column for suction – leaving the public vulnerable to innocent and intentional contamination. So, an investment of thousands of crores to construct the infrastructure, and process clean, potable water is undone at the consumer's end on account of improper operation of the water system. Makes you wonder if those investments were meant for only those who don't care or are willing to spend more on water at the receiving end!.

The situation is no different with power supply. Despite public investments to the tune of thousands of crores, the power supplied to consumers – both residential and commercial/industrial - is unreliable and subject to fluctuation. Just the other day, I pointed out how a textile manufacturer from the South was unable to purchase higher productivity machines from Thailand on account of the lack of reliable power supply. (Until the recent Electricity Act, most firms invested in and generated power the costly way at small scales to counter the problem). So bad was the situation among residential users, that for many years, private companies had a field day hawking UPSs, emergency lights and voltage stabilizers. But as the conventional desi wisdom goes, who cares so long as they turn in profits to the private manufacturers and add to the country's GDP!

Two years back, I wrote to my MP, Mr. Maran, with a copy to the Chennai Corporation, suggesting a small drain be constructed from the front of my residence (where water pools up to near knee height during rains) to the storm water drain not 50 meters away on the parallel street – if only to save passers by from an open electricity junction box. But no, they'd rather electrocute us or have each household spend a lakh to raise the floor than commit a few thousand rupees to construct the drain. It's one thing to provide unsatisfactory service; it is another to induce expenditures from poor planning, bad work or one's dereliction of duty. This is no one off example. It is pretty much the rule in this country. The Government spends thousands of crores on your behalf, does a bad job with it, and sticks you with additional expenses merely to benefit from the project. Strangely, and as ardently as economists seek to minimize costs and improve efficiency, there are many among us, at least in the lower rungs of public administration and society, who seek just the opposite. Apparently, there is a constituency that lives on corruption, public waste and inefficiency (including those who profit in the industry and at the bourses). Their motives are clearly at cross-purposes with the rest of the society. The earlier we identify and deal with them, the better for (the rest of) us.

(Check back at this blog a year from now to learn if I survived the rains!)