India 65 years later - a proud but flawed democracy

On the eve of India's 65th 'Independence Day' I am filled with Pride as well as concern. Proud for the fact that India has survived as a democracy in a neighborhood brimming with communist and military regimes and concerned for the rapidly declining morality of the same democratic system and lack of civility that typically follows economic development.

When India gained Independence from the British empire in 1947, she was a nation divided along religious and caste lines, extremely poor and uneducated and  faced a mountain of humanitarian challenges following partition of Pakistan. When India therefore decided to be a parliamentary democracy, it was no surprise that most of the leading experts of the time wrote India's obituary as a united nation. No Nation as big, diverse, uneducated, fragmented and poor had ever experimented with a universal adult franchise. All the Western democracies of the time had evolved against the backdrop of considerable cultural, religious and linguistic homogeneity. India not only proved the experts wrong, she evolved as a leader in advocating democratic principles and provided nations coming out of colonial rule with a democratic example.

Ever since the first Parliemantry elections held in 1951-52, India has been holding fair, independent and peaceful elections at national, state and municipal levels. Approximately 150 million Muslims (second highest population of Muslims in the world), 24 million Christians, 22 million Sikhs continue to peacefully coexist with c. 820 million Hindus and and exercise their voting rights without fear, often influencing elections disproportionately. Politicians representing an electorate that speaks more than 100 languages (India has 22 languages spoken by at least a million people and 114 languages spoken by at least 10,000 people) debate and vote on policy issues. Constitution continues to grant civil liberties around freedom of speech (restricted to an extent by defamation laws), freedom of religion, universal adult franchise and protection of property rights. It is a truly remarkable achievement. India's democratic achievements are supplemented by her considerable economic development (fourth largest economy in PPP terms) and entrepreneurial successes globally.

In India's strength and pride however lies her biggest weakness. India was categorized as a 'Flawed Democracy' by the Economist magazine in its Democracy Index. In the 2011 edition, India ranked 39 with a score of 7.3. While India got stellar scores on 'Electoral process and pluralism' and 'Civil Liberties', score on 'Functioning of government', was low and score on 'Political participation' and 'Political culture'  was exceptionally poor.  Political Participation and Political Culture are two correctly identified areas of weakness for Indian democracy.

On political participation front, voter turnout has declined in India since independence and consistently remain significantly lower than the desired 70%. 61.16% of registered voters voted in the 1952 Parliamentary elections while only 58.19% voted in 2009 elections. Numbers below demonstrates how India's voter turnout is significantly less than some other large emerging and developed countries.

Country Voter Turnout*
India 58.19%
Indonesia 70.99%
Malaysia 75.99%
Sri Lanka 61.26%
South Africa 77.30%
Thailand 75.03%
US         64.36%
UK          65.77%

*in last Parliamentary or equivalent election
Source - Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance

Lower turnout is largely a reflection of dissatisfaction of a large section of population with the political process. A majority government elected by 58% of people effectively represent the choice of less than 30% of registered voters which is not healthy.

Score on the political culture largely reflect the dissatisfaction of the people with their parliamentary leaders and democratic process. It manifests in a growing frustration with the system that makes a large section of people inclined to accept a technocratic rule rather than a democratically elected government. Indian politicians have failed miserably in providing the most basic of infrastructure to the public. Even in the metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai that have considerable wealth, public transport, sanitation. environment and law and order situation remains woefully poor.  Both Mumbai and Delhi were in the bottom 30 cities for liveability according to the Economist Intelligence Unit liveability ranking in 2011.

This failure is further compounded by widespread corruption in all aspects of public life. Corruption has become a way of life for everyone - bribes are common place from every day services like getting a driving license or passport to getting mining leases and telecom licenses and spectrum. Elections campaigning involves truck loads of black money and it is rare for the political leaders to debate issues around infrastructure, poverty, law and order and education. Election campaigns are all about appeasement of minorities and continued repression of those minorities post winning the elections to perpetuate their misery so that they remain a loyal vote bank.

Given the inefficiency of the legal systems and political capture of investigative agencies and police, criminal cases drag on for tens of years that allows alleged criminals to enter and further pollute the political culture (Indian law only bars convicted criminals from running for office) India's current Parliament has 150 members out of 543 with serious criminal charges against them. This number increased from 128 in the last Parliament. This explains the rot that has set in the entire political process.

Political participation and political culture form a vicious circle of cause and effect that is very difficult to break; Because participation is low, political culture has little incentive to improve; Because political culture is so deeply rotten, there is lack of participation. How this circle can be broken is what would define the future of democracy in India as the present situation is clearly not sustainable.

World's Largest Power Outage - Facts and who failed India for the most basic of Infrastructure Services

India suffered what was world's largest ever blackout two days in a row - 670 Million people lost power, miners were trapped underground, subways and trains came to a screeching halt. Businesses are estimated to have lost millions in additional costs and lost production. The Country yet again suffered a huge reputation blow at a time India could rather avoid any further confidence wrecking event.

For much of the Developed world, uninterrupted power is a basic necessity but for majority of Indians, getting-by without power for long hours and sometimes days at a stretch is a routine affair. This outage however was unprecedented. While a lot has already been said about this outage with eye catching headlines, I would try to bring out some facts and share my personal view on who really powered India off.

- India is world's second most populous country, largest democracy, fourth largest economy (PPP terms) and fifth largest electricity producer. India's total power generation capacity at 200 Gigawatts is roughly one fifth of US and sufficient to meet base demand as India's per-capita power consumption is less than a tenth of the US and less than half of China's . Despite such a low per-capita consumption, India's total generation capacity falls short of peak demand by 16%.

- One would think 16% deficit is not as bad as our long power outages even in large metropolitan cities would suggest. The truth is our plants chronically operate at a much lower plant load factor (capacity utilization). This is due to shortage of coal which in turn is due to the government monopoly on coal mining and widespread corruption. India's average PLF across all thermal plants declined from 77.5% in 2009-10 to 73.3% in 2011-12. Bottlenecks in the transmission (electricity grid) infrastructure (grid) exacerbate the shortage.

- Roughly 35% of power we generare is lost to theft, inefficient transmission and free handouts. Most amazing aspect of this statistic is no one knows, inluding our regulators and government, the break up of this 35% loss, i.e. how much is technical losses and how much is because of pilferage, issues with metering etc. In commercial context, this 35% lost power costs $11 billion. To put this loss in context, transmission and distribution losses in the US were estimated at 6.5% in 2007. It would be naive to expect a system to work and grow where more than 35% of total output is lost, it is similarly unreasonable to expect the middle class and industry to pay 100% for 65% of the left over and yet unreliable power. What we have here is a vicious circle.

- Our neighbor China has been adding 6 times more electricity than India in recent years. We despite the acute shortage and a crisis situation achieved only 64% of an already modest target of 78,000 MW of new capacity addition in the 2007-12 eleventh five year plan.

- To emphasize how bad the situation is, it is worth pointing out our grid does not reach 300 million or roughly 30% of our population. Post restoration of grid, 300 million or an entire US stands disconnected from this most basic of infrastructure services.

It is therefore reasonable to ask why we are in such a dire situation after more than 65 years of independence despite having abundant availability of coal, huge untapped hydro-power resources and no lack of capital and skills. Private Sector invested a record $60 billion in setting up power plants in last 5 years but most Private Sector generation capacity is idle due to lack of coal linkages and as a consequence they are in financial stress.

This is yet again an area where our Politicians have failed us miserably. Politicians have used electricity like cash to win votes.

With more than 60% of our population still living in rural areas and engaged in agrarian pursuits, Politicians have won elections with promises of free subsidy to farmers. Our gullible farmers have failed to realize the benefits of a 'paid for' but reliable electricity supply and fallen for a broken system that delivers free but unstable frequency of power few hours a day. Similar is the situation in cities where many of the commercial and residential users have accepted power theft as a way of life to compensate for additional money they spend on running generators and suffering the inconvenience. Needless to mention the widespread power theft that goes on in the slums. Politicians are more than happy to propagate condoning such thefts to win votes in elections.

Solution to the power problem in India rests with a widespread reform of Political culture. Until such time that Coal and Electricity both remain within the Government control, there is little or no hope. I however remain an optimist and count on Indian entrepreneurship and industry to continue to chug along on diesel run generators and captive power plants. Middle class would continue to turn a blind eye as 'Power Inverters', the quintessential Indian household gadget, continues to serve them during power outages. Majority of farmers would continue to put their heart and soul into their field to produce and survive despite the Government. The handful of rich and powerful politically affiliated farmers would continue to generate loads of illicit tax free income, not pay for the electricity they consume, over consume subsidized fertlizers and continue to poison and deplete our ground water as they are the winners of our current politicl culture.