By Patricia Mukhim
On Thursday (April 25) the power crisis hit everyone hard. Unscheduled load shedding started at 7 am and lasted up to 10 am. The next round began at 2 pm and lasted until 4 pm. The next cycle starts at midnight up to ‘no one knows when,’ because we are all asleep by then. We are now in the 41st year of statehood. All these years we have had governments that could not take any major decisions whether it be for setting up a thermal power plant, bringing the rail head to Byrnihat, expanding our roads and connecting the state internally etc., Our health and nutritional status is bad. Connectivity to the rural areas is dismal. From January this year most of us living in urban areas have had to buy water in tankers because the Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) cannot supply adequate water to all residents, except those living in elite and prime localities. We are in agony over the traffic jams caused by a perennial flow of coal trucks.
When people tried to contact their respective Area Managers to ask why the lights went off in the morning when kitchen and bathroom related activities are at their highest, the answer they got was that there is load shedding. When asked why this was not announced so that people could be prepared, the answer was that such announcements should come from the higher ups in the Meghalaya Electricity Corporation Ltd (MeECL). A senior government functionary later informed this writer that it is not possible for Meghalaya to purchase power from the central grid because the purchase price was far above the price that consumers were willing to pay. Now this is not a fair assumption. Consumers will pay if they are told the bare facts and if service is efficient. But consumers will not pay for mismanagement. And going by what one sees there is mismanagement aplenty in the MeECL which begins with the vacuum in the key position – that of the Chairman. An IAS officer with no managerial experience cannot run a corporate entity. And the MeECL was corporatized mainly because it needed to come up with a better revenue model that would not be dependent on government resources forever. Alas! This looks like a tall order. Government run Boards and Corporations have all failed; some like the Meghalaya Watches and Meghalaya Electronics Development Corporation have died and been silently buried. Are we waiting for MeECL to meet the same fate, because if this entity is not infused with better management practices; if its employees, particularly its technical manpower don’t pull up their socks and be held accountable for their failures and incompetence it will not be long before the Corporation becomes sick and unviable.
Many who visit Meghalaya wonder why such a coal rich and coal exporting state could not, in all these years, set up a thermal power project. The only one set up a few years after statehood at Nangalbibra failed miserably. Its machinery was all sold as scrap. I recall visiting this site as a member of the State Planning Board in 1988. The project is an indictment on the planners who chose a site that was not feasible. The MeSEB then was incapable of driving the project. It either had no technical expertise, or the place was so distant that carting machinery there made the whole exercise a futile one. A few crore rupees was invested then in the thermal project. It failed and no questions were asked. Could you have had such a failure in the private sector without someone losing their job? Heads would have rolled, people would have had to answer for their monumental errors and like the chit fund dream merchants they would have had to go to jail. But in Meghalaya no one is held accountable for many such failures.
Who for instance will pay for the delay in commissioning of the Meghalaya House at Russell Street Kolkata? When AL Hek was General Administrative Department (GAD) minister he made several excuses as to why escalation costs were justified. The Government agreed to defray those costs. But even today we see no signs of the House being ready for occupation. It is learnt that the entire sanitation work is pending since the bulk of the work to be carried out would involve digging across the public road. Now should the Government of Meghalaya he held responsible for these technical details? Or should the building Company answer for it? Should the Government be meeting the time and cost overruns for this project which has overshot its deadline by almost 5 years if not more? This is not how governments are run. The tragedy here is that none of us have questioned these huge payments for delayed projects. We have accepted these as good business practices when in fact these are all scams and should be investigated by the CBI.
Now take the case of the much touted and very controversial Leshka project which senior MeECL technicians believe we are incapable of understanding how it is supposed to run and therefore cannot critique it. Is there anything under the sun that is so hard to understand and which is the exclusive domain of the MeECL engineers? There are technical experts who we have consulted from other electricity generation companies and whose views are that the Leshka project is a very expensive investment with little returns. Two of the three units of the project are not generating the required mega-watts of power. Bad investment yet again? Huge time and cost overruns! Who pays for this incompetence? Should these badly crafted projects be under-written by the public exchequer? It’s time to hold people to account.
Then we have the Ganol project in Garo Hills over which there is a lot of finger-pointing between the Congress and the opposition parties in the Assembly. What is the construction period of that project? By when will it be commissioned? Can someone please tell us something? And yes we have the Mawphu project which has the capacity to generate 85 MW of power. The detailed project report (DPR) for this was prepared by the North Eastern Electrical Power Corporation (NEEPCo) some three or four years ago. There was a lot of bitching by MeECL engineers that the project should be handled by them and should not go to an outside firm. The project did not go to NEEPCo but it has also not been taken up in right earnest by any other firm. If I were the CM I would hesitate to commission the MeECL to do it. Leshka is nothing short of a scam! And past experience tells us that they do a bad job of what they are tasked to do. They cannot even competently run the existing infrastructure, apart from being top heavy. The bottom line is that a Corporation needs smart management unlike a Government department where accountability mechanisms are blurred. MeECL should be audited by an outside firm to assess employee output. As of today, ‘Cost to Company’ (CTC) in the MeECL is far too high for it to be sustainable.
Another question that plagues the mind is why Meghalaya which sells 6 – 7 million tonnes of coal to Bangladesh every year has not been able to use the same coal to generate thermal power. Experts say that this quantum of coal has the capacity to generate 2000 MWs of power. This would have augmented the power needs of industry and private consumers. Winters would not have to be about load-shedding. Most developed countries import raw materials, add value to them and sell them at a premium. Here we sell off all our raw materials with no thought for the future. Even the Lafarge project in Shella and Nongtrai area is an example of a sell-out of raw materials to Bangladesh, albeit through an international agency. There is no value addition on this side of the border by way of employment generation and by learning from the manufacturing capability of an international cement giant.
There are times when we must agonise about the failure of our elected representatives to deliver. But maybe we have elected people incapable of thinking and using their brains for a larger purpose. We have elected pygmies with small minds and huge appetites for power and money. The bureaucracy has only colluded with them or become experts at explaining away all failures. Meghalaya has been sleep-walking for 41 years. We are now looking at Dr Mukul Sangma to lead us to new beginnings. But does he have the time for strategic thinking? Many claim that Dr Sangma has everything on his fingertips and knows exactly what is happening in each department. But running the government is not a one-man task. There must be cohesion and collaboration; a pooling of ideas; developing a new vision and tapping the huge potential of those who wish this state well. If the doctor is to pull this monumental and monolithic government machinery all by himself, he will burn out. At this juncture we cannot afford a burnt out CM! He has miles to go and his colleagues had better pull their weight.
But meanwhile we need to do a serious assessment of all the money spent in unfinished/incomplete projects and make those in power accountable for them. For starters let’s ask why the airport at Umroi is a non-starter? And when will the Shillong bye-pass be commissioned? And when will Meghalaya House Russell Street be completed? These are questions that should have been asked in the Assembly instead of quibbling about petty matters.