Amid prices rise and power cuts in the Indian capital, and buck-passing between politicians and companies, can renewable power solve the city's energy problems?
The Guardian Editorial
By Kavitha Rao
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| Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal attends a public hearing called by Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission on June 3, 2013 in New Delhi. Photograph: Jasjeet Plaha/Getty Images |
Delhi is in the midst of a power struggle, but not the political
kind. The city is rapidly running out of energy, as government, opposition and
private suppliers all bicker about who is to blame. In the past two years, the
Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) has hiked power rates four times, by a whopping
26%, and another hike is expected, despite the fury of consumers. Meanwhile,
many beleaguered Delhi residentssuffer eight-hour-long power cuts in 45
degree summer heat.
With local elections coming up in November, Chief Minister Sheila
Dixit has been quick to shove the blame on to private distribution
companies (known as "discoms"). The chief minister even wrote an
angry letter to business tycoon Anil Ambani, the head of Reliance
Infrastructure, which owns two of Delhi's biggest discoms. Somewhat belatedly,
she directed him to fix the power crisis and ensure all-day electricity. Dixit
admitted she was "shocked' to learn that the discoms
owe dues amounting to nearly Rs 33 billion to the government (about £375
million).
But the government is no hapless innocent, claim opposition
parties. Maverick activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal has alleged that the Delhi government is colluding with discoms to
fudge losses, line their pockets and pass on costs to the consumers. The
opposition Bhartiya Janata Party is also calling for an inquiry into the financial
mismanagement of the discoms and demanding intervention by the
Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, as the government muddles along, green campaigners
point out that Delhi has completely ignored other solutions. A recent report by Greenpeace India revealed Delhi's
miserable failure to attain renewable energy targets. Delhi actually achieved
less than 1% of its target, making it the worst performer amongst 22 states,
despite being by far the wealthiest.
Part of the problem,
says report author and senior Greenpeace campaigner Abhishek Pratap, is Delhi's
cossetted status. "As the capital, Delhi gets 75% of its energy from coal
plants in other states. This has made the city complacent, and slow to consider
other alternatives. The DERC does not even have a proper policy for renewable
energy," he points out.
The report also pointed out the growing inequity between rural and
urban areas. Delhi consumes double the national average of electricity, while
poorer states such as Bihar go short. Coal guzzling also comes at a huge environmental cost for the city, and
the country, with India now on the brink of a public health crisis.
"This report is an
indictment of the whole policy framework around renewables and the dismissive
attitude of the government towards it," wrote Pratap in a stinging
foreword, "Renewable power could have been a tool to bridge the
demand-supply gap in the energy sector across the country. But the toothless
mechanism combined with unambitious targets has failed to give any impetus to
renewables in India."
Now, Delhi is belatedly
scrambling for alternatives. Greenpeace believes solar energy is a good
alternative for Delhi, given its nearly 350 sunny days a year. "People
think solar energy needs a lot of land, but Delhi has plenty of roof space.
It's not a vertical city like Mumbai; it's a radial city," says Pratap.
Currently, no subsidies exist for solar users, and ignorance about solar
alternatives means that very few Delhi households actually consider solar
options.
But things may be changing. On June 3, Sheila Dixit opened a new solar project. "Our country is
endowed with abundant natural sunshine. For our electricity needs, we should
look towards the sun," said Dixit. These platitudes have been heard before
though; about two years ago there was much talk about a renewable energy
policy, but little action.
But this time around,
with desperate times calling for desperate measures, Pratap expects some
progress. Greenpeace is meeting with government officials this week to talk
about a viable renewable energy policy, with incentives and support for
discoms, and punitive measures to ensure compliance. Meanwhile, it has just
launched a new campaign to mobilise public support for solar energy. "Delhi
cannot depend on coal for energy any more, nor can it look to other states. If
it does not consider renewable energy, the city will run out of power very
soon," says Pratap. Ominous words. Is the Delhi government - and its
public - listening?
The fact that police have the right to monitor the
communications of all its citizens – in secret – is a classic hallmark of a
state that fears freedom
The Guardian Editorial
A few months before he was first elected president in 2008, Barack Obama made a
calculation that dismayed many of his ardent supporters but which he judged
essential to maintain his drive to the White House. By backing President Bush's bill granting the US
government wide new surveillance powers
– including legal immunity for telecomscompanies
which had co-operated with the Bush administration's post-9/11 programme of
wiretapping without warrants – Mr Obama stepped back from an issue that had
initially helped to define his candidacy but was now judged to threaten his
national security credentials. It was a big call. Even so, it seems unlikely
that either supporters or critics, or even Mr Obama himself, ever believed that
five years later a re-elected President Obama would oversee an administration
that stands accused of routinely snooping into the phone records of millions of
Americans.
Yet that is the situation at the heart of the Guardian's exclusive story this
week that America's immense National Security Agency is doing just this on Mr
Obama's watch. The revelation that a secret order, issued by the
secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requires one of the largest
telecoms providers in the US to provide a daily diet of millions of US phone
records to the FBI, poses Americans with a major civil liberties challenge.
Under the terms of the order, everything about every call made during a three
month period – excepting only the calls' actual contents – is offered up to the
bureau and the NSA on a gargantuan routine basis. It seems improbable that the
order revealed yesterday is the only one of its kind. So the assumption has to
be that this is the new normality of American state surveillance. The special
courts set up to monitor and approve industrial data-harvesting appear to
provide little check on the scale of the activity.
Few Americans believe
that they live in a police state; indeed many would be outraged at the
suggestion. Yet the everyday fact that the police have the right to monitor the
communications of all its citizens – in secret – is a classic hallmark of a
state that fears freedom as well as championing it. Ironically, the Guardian's
revelations were published 69 years to the day since US and British soldiers
launched the D-day invasion of Europe. The young Americans who fought their way
up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from
a tyranny. They did not think that they were making it safe for their own
rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants.
No one living in Britain should be naive about the reality of the
terrorist threat against which such powers are deployed, least of all in the
volatile aftermath of the Woolwich murder. Nor, in the light of the revelations
from the US, ought we to be smug about the surveillance and data collection
that goes on daily in our own midst too. By some readings, similar legal
tools already exist here under the regulation of investigatory powers
legislation. Both Conservative and Labour MPs have made clear they want new
"snooper's charter" powers over email records. And western European
security services, Britain's GCHQ monitoring agency in particular, have always
regarded the ability to trade information with the US authorities as their life-blood.
But it is American civil
liberties that are primarily in the spotlight now. Ever since 9/11, the US has
allowed the war on terror to frame a new domestic authoritarianism that is
strikingly at odds with America's passionate sense of its own freedom. This week's
revelations have stunned millions of Americans whose justified outrage against
9/11 surely never led them to expect such routine and unrestrained surveillance
on such a massive scale. US politicians have a poor post-9/11 record of
confronting such powers. Even now, it is possible that many will look the other
way. But this is an existential challenge to American freedom. That it has been
so relentlessly prosecuted by a leader who once promised to stand up
against such authority, makes the challenge more pressing, not less.
