Engaging with Power Policy

My talk is focussed on the power sector and covers Prayas’ experience in engaging in power policy. When I talk about the power sector, I am confining myself to the mainstream grid. I am not covering non-grid dispersed power. This is because the main grid system is much bigger and in a way it impacts all of us including the marginalised in the country

Power is a key infrastructure. The mainstream grid sector has many players who have considerable muscle. There are state players, private players, Indian players, and International players. There are also financial institutions. It is a sector in which everybody is interested. Unlike some other sectors in which nobody is interested in what is happening, it is not a neglected sector.

Another important aspect is that the sector is heavily unionized. The utilities are unionised at both worker and officer levels. This is relevant because we work with the. se unions, as they help us in understanding the intricacies and providing analytic insights into this technically complex sector.

The power sector also has multiple linkages. On one side there are linkages to fuel supply. On the other, it is linked to economic issues, as it is considered necessary for economic growth. For many people electricity is a key livelihood support. This is true for agriculture as well as for small shops and businesses. Power also has strong socio-political linkages as many consumers are being given power at rates lower than the cost of generation. There are also very strong environmental linkages in terms of environmental pollution, climate change etc.

Why engage with Power Policy? Power impacts all of us and many of us are not very happy with the way the policy formulation happens in this sector. It is based on a highly centralised, growth oriented, supply sided, consumption directed paradigm. The focus is completely on economic growth and financial viability. If the utilities make good profits, it is believed that the sector is doing well. Issues of governance, equity sustainability are typically neglected. Do the poor consume electricity? Does it support the economic activities of the poor ? These questions are never considered, while formulating power policy.

The situation has worsened in many ways since the mid 80s. Over the years there is a weakening of coherent policy processes. The sector is getting more controlled by vested interests. It is also getting complex and therefore it becomes very important for civil society to engage in policy. We also realise that any engagement with policy has a multiplier effect in terms of programs or projects.

POLICY INFLUENCES
If you look at the sector, we have the utilities, which supply power. We have the state, which makes the policy, and we have the regulatory institutions.

Prayas’ strategy for engaging with policy
We start engaging at the operations level. This relates to the day-to-day problems like No power, Poor quality of power etc. Then we move to issues connected with institutions and the government. How to democratise the institutions that actually control the operations? Then comes the focus on the policy issues. So our engagement is a transition. We start with the operational issues, graduate to institutions and governments and try to work on the policy. While doing so, we work to create spaces for civil society and help them to use these spaces strategically.

In terms of actors, we deal with both mainstream and unconventional actors. Mainstream actors include state, industries, professional bodies and political groups (these could be included both in the mainstream and the unconventional). In our engagement we focus more on the civil society groups. We use say 70% of our energies to build pressure from below. That is through discourse, through generation of new ideas, developing advocacy material and catalysing the transition from people being consumers to active citizens (a customer is typically only bothered about her/his own problems whereas a citizen is interested in broader sector issues).

We play the role of a watchdog (by monitoring public institutions). We also provide analysis support to many campaigns, such as those of Green peace, or campaigns against big dams by the Narmada Bachao Andolan

Our direct interventions include inputs in policy planning processes of the State, commenting on strategic documents like those prepared by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. We also participate in regulatory interventions in many states and at the central level.

Effectiveness
It is a mixed bag. It is not that we have been successful all the time. But people do remember some of our interventions. For example, the Enron campaign. We shared our expertise and support with various organizations that were in the frontline in campaigning on the Enron issue. What it resulted in-- is another story. At least better contracts are being drawn with private power producers in the country, as knowledge and capacity to handle such contracts has been generated.

Another area of immpact is the democratising of the regulatory processes. We have been able to intervene in the regulatory processes at a very early stage, by doing surveys, publishing booklets, etc. For example our survey booklet is a kind of a toolkit for assessing the effectiveness of regulatory engagement. We have also been successful in generating public interest resources. We have a primer on the power sector, which is a techno-economic primer explaining the whole sector and its linkages. We have introduced some terminologies like TAP --Transparency Accountability and Participation. Now it has become accepted terminology in the discourse in the sector, in debates on democratising the sector. We have created some very simple spreadsheet based toolkits for power generation, tariff analysis, which many campaigners use.

These help to check whether the tariff projected by an ultra mega power project is correct or not.

We have not been very successful in introducing positive ideas into national policies and plans. The Electricity Act was a major policy step in the Indian energy sector. We were not able to influence it very significantly. We could not contribute much in the 11th plan process even though we are part of the power sector working group. But we have been able to prevent some gross mistakes. This has been a success.

We have also not been very successful in developing alternative models. We have only been able to promote some aspects like energy efficiency, demand side management, etc. It is also sad that many of the spaces that we have created have not been used strategically. For example, we made efforts to ensure that there is consumer representation in many of the advisory committees. But very often, we are not able to find proper people to fill those posts, and even when some people are found, they often do not have the resources to utilize that space properly.

What are the challenges?
There are external challenges and internal challenges. The internal challenges are: basically how do we make ourselves accountable? Who are we accountable to as a civil society organisation? Another big internal challenge is how we get people to work for us. It is very challenging exciting work, but it is not very financially rewarding, and there is not much peer recognition.

External challenges are something that all of you are aware of. We need support. Who will support us? And there are people who do not like the kind of work that we do. They try to threaten us. How do we face those threats? How do we build our constituency so that we can survive?

Lessons
We have realized that this transition from operations to governance institutions, to policy is essential. But we need to stay grounded all the time. It will simply not do, to keep on doing policy work without inputs at the ground level.

Early process interventions always help. An example is the case when the regulatory institutions came in the energy sector. Our early suggestion to hold pubic hearings before any tariff is decided was incorporated. Once it is put, it has to be followed. We have been able to delicately balance the macro perspective and the rootedness. It is important to be able to speak to the World Bank (which talks about the Country Assistance Strategy), but it is equally important to visit the site where Enron is (to learn and discuss about the local impacts). That kind of a balance we manage not individually, but we have people with different capabilities in our group.

We wish to carry out paradigm work. NAPM has been requesting us to work on alternative paradigms consistently. However we find that is not an easy job to draw up an alternative paradigm because it takes a lot of effort and it has many political dimensions. We are at the moment satisfied with working on the components of the alternative paradigm and enriching the debate.

To engage with policy, political understanding is as important as techno-economic grasp. This is something that I have personally learnt myself, especially because I am an out and out technical person, by training. But I have understood that most of the time the technical capabilities that are needed are only addition, multiplication, division, analytical skills, and not some complex integrals or modelling.

To summarise: In the policy engagement our focus has been on broadening the boundaries, to bring in the public interest agenda all the time. Whether it is a mainstream forum or a civil society forum we work to increase the participation of the people by demystifying the sector. We realise there is one advantage being a civil society actor: we need to demystify only to the extent of being capable of asking the right questions. If we can do that it is a very big achievement.

Try to deepen the debate. At no point of time we claim to be the people who are experts who can tell what is to be done. But because of the credibility that we have built over a period of time, we are able to get people with different view points to get together and build a consensus.

What we ask is not so much as what we are able to do, but what will happen if we are not there. If we are not there, things will be much worse and so we work with a sense of urgency. To quote Gandhi ‘live as if you are going to die tomorrow’.

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