On a visit to Manipur, I asked several
people which aspect of their lives had changed the most from the perspective of
governance and/or delivery of public goods and services. This wasn’t meant to
be a systematic sample survey and was more of a dipstick indicator. Manipur has
a population of 2.86 million and nearly 30 per cent of it is urban. The people
I spoke to were from Imphal, so there is a bit of a bias(unfair,पक्षपात) in the sample. The
Imphal agglomeration(mass,ढेर), not just the municipal area, has a population around
5,50,000. This gives you some idea of the possible sample bias.
Electricity distribution found the top
mention in the people’s responses. Electricity supply has three aspects:
Generation, transmission and distribution. Generation will be a major issue in
Manipur, especially in times other than the rainy season. Much of the power
will have to come from outside the state — Arunachal Pradesh (Lower Subansiri),
Assam (Bongaigaon) and Tripura (Palatana) — even if hydroelectricity generation
from the Loktak project increases.
The responses of the people I spoke to had
to do with distribution, not generation. They talked of prepaid electricity.
Manipur is not the only state to experiment with such an idea. Haryana was the
first state to introduce prepaid electricity. Lucknow, in UP, has prepaid
electricity vouchers. These vouchers require a prepaid electricity meter, so
that consumers can be alerted when a recharge is requisite(necessary,आवश्यक). Such meters make life
easier. In addition, the Lucknow electricity supply authority offered a tariff
rebate to encourage the switch. Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh has a similar
scheme, though there has been resistance in the state with consumers
complaining that their monthly bills have increased. Their complaint is
understandable. After all, the purpose of prepaid meters and prepaid vouchers
isn’t only to make life easier. They also intend to reduce aggregate technical
and commercial losses (ATC), a part of which is euphemism for theft.
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In Manipur, the idea of prepaid electricity
was targeted at clandestine(illegal,अवैध) power connections. Seen this way, the resistance to
meters in Itanagar does not seem odd. That there were no reports of resistance
in Imphal appears bizarre(strange,अजीब).
Some towns and some types of domestic
consumers in Madhya Pradesh will also have prepaid connections once the MP
Electricity Regulatory Commission approves the scheme. Chandigarh is also
slated to have a similar scheme, so are Pune and Mumbai. Telangana plans
prepaid meters for government offices.
To get back to Manipur, the Manipur State
Power Distribution Company Limited has plans to provide meters to all
consumers. People unfamiliar with Manipur may not realise that the state has
two distinct geographical regions: The valley— where 60 per cent of the state’s
population lives — and the hilly areas. Access to public goods and services is
much more arduous(difficult,कठिन) in the hilly regions, terrain being a major constraint.
There will be 1,00,000 electronic meters outside the valley, but except for
district headquarters and towns in the hills, these will not be be prepaid.
The experiment with prepaid meters has
begun in four districts: Imphal East, Imphal West, Thoubal and Bishnupur. The
government did not embark(start,प्रवेश) on the project in all the four districts at one go.
Prepaid meters were first installed in central parts of Imphal because the
government wanted to gauge if the experiment would work.
People have been jailed for stealing
electricity and tampering with meters. The power situation has improved.
Collections from payments of electricity bills have increased. At the same time,
demand for electricity has reduced by 50 per cent and tripping incidents have
become rarer. The number of consumers has also gone up. One should reiterate(repeat,दोहरान) that this is an increase
in the number of legal consumers. There is better planning — on the supply side
— and there is no need for VIP lines (those guaranteed uninterrupted power
supply regardless of what was happening in the rest of Manipur).
My respondents — not just people who work
for the government — told me all this with a sense of pride. If consumers know
exactly how much electricity they are consuming (there are instant alerts) and
how much that costs (not quite the same with post-paid bills), they are more
judicious in using electricity.
Although the connection is somewhat
distant, the prepaid metering experiment reminded me of an anecdote in Prafulla
Chandra Ray’s (1861-1944) autobiography — it has not been translated into
English. It was published in 1937. Ray studied BSc (physics, chemistry,
biology) at Edinburgh University. At that time, Edinburgh University didn’t
have a system of tuition fees. If a student liked the lecture, he/she left some
money for the lecturer while leaving the lecture hall. I wonder if we will ever
have prepaid vouchers for higher education, specific to the lecturer.
courtesy:indian express
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