ELECTRICITY ACT 2003

Toiling Masses Will Be The Worst Hit

Shyamal Chakraborty

OF all the anti-people legislations passed by the parliament over the past fifteen years, the Electricity Act 2003 shall prove the most disastrous for the common people. The Act seeks to remove all powers in the electricity sector from the hands of the state governments and place them in the control of the union government. 

The Act seeks to sacrifice the interests of 90 per cent of the 16 crore of electricity consuming families of the country in the name of equal price and equal competition.  This Act will benefit the remaining 10 per cent of the power consumers.  Thus, it would be the workers, the agricultural workers, the rural poor and the landless, the urban poor, the slum dwellers, and the lower middle class who will stand to suffer most.  With the removal of cross subsidy, everyone shall be compelled to purchase electricity at the same rate.

The cross subsidy had helped the increase in the number of electricity consumers among the toiling masses. The Act will effectively put an end to that prospect in the future.

The electricity charges will increase by 3-4 times in the agricultural sector.  The agricultural economy itself will be hit very badly.  The cost of agricultural produce will shoot up.  The withdrawal of subsidy in the fertiliser sector has already left matters heavily biased against the small farmer.

The scenario is complicated by the introduction of foreign imports in the agricultural market. Two forms of disaster will happen.  First, large numbers of farmers will be driven off from the market once their produce do not get to be appropriately sold. Suicides among peasants are bound to go up in the circumstances.

Second, with the entire food crops market of the world being under the control of five big multi-national corporations, the profit-hunting by the MNC’s will leave the small farmers gasping for relief even as prices would soar. 

With subsidies withdrawn from electricity supplied to the small and cottage industries, thousand upon thousands of small industrial units will close down, and the number of the unemployed would keep increasing.

In the education and health sectors, the effects will be another disaster.  The cost of education and of health care at every level will increase, affecting not only the state governments but also the voluntary organisations, which too provide at least some amount of amount of health service at a low cost.

For the production of machineries for electricity generation, we have the big state sector enterprise, the Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL).  BHEL’s efforts are supplemented by three thousand-odd industrial enterprises. Together they produce 90 per cent of the machineries and the allied engineering and infrastructural articles required for the generation and distribution of electricity, making the country self-sufficient for all practical purposes in this regard.  The bottom-most layer of the production facilities are made up of thousands more of small enterprises.  Once the Electricity Act 2003 is brought into effect, the bulk of this structure will be gone, replaced by powerful MNC groups that will supply the required equipment. Unemployment will further go up even as the country will become dependent for electricity generation processes.

Of the five lakh 80 thousand villages, a large number of the population of close to five lakh villages consume electricity. For the rest, availing themselves of electricity connections now will be a very costly exercise, in terms of purchasing poles, wires, and transformers. The cost of running pump sets will also go up.  Rural electrification will be halted. The rural people will be pushed back to the pre-electricity days. What will happen to the process of reading and writing for the children residing in the rural areas?

India has a population of eight crore tribal people.  The Lokdeep Prakalp project provides electricity to many households of these people at a low cost.  This has been possible because of the existence of cross subsidy.  Once the process of privatisation of electricity sector starts, the households of the tribal people will get plunged into darkness. The effort going on towards providing them with equality of dignity as well as improving their economic conditions and standard of education will stop.  Alienation and separatism will gain ground strengthening the hands of the imperialists.

Electricity had remained a part of the service sector.  Electricity has been an article of essential consumption of the people.  The Electricity Act 2003 will make electricity a commodity.  In other words, those with higher incomes will be benefited; those without will face a disaster.

[Shyamal Chakraborty is a member of the central committee of the CPI-M]