Research area: Energy Transitions

Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States

Introduction

Despite several decades of reform, India’s electricity sector remains marked by the twin problems of financial indebtedness and inability to provide universal, high quality electricity for all. Although political obstacles to reform are frequently invoked in electricity policy debates, Mapping Power provides the first thorough analysis of the political economy of electricity in Indian states. Through narratives of the electricity sectors in fifteen major states, this book argues that a historically rooted political economy analysis provides the most useful means to understand the past and identify reforms for the future. The book begins with an analytic framework to understand how the political economy of power both shapes and is shaped by a given state’s larger political economy. The book concludes with a synthetic account of the political economy of electricity that is animated by insights from the state-level empirical materials. The volume shows that attempts to depoliticize the sector are misplaced. Instead, successful reform efforts should aim at a positive dynamic between electricity reform and electoral success.

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Protecting Power: The Politics of Partial Reforms in Punjab

Summary

Punjab’s power sector, known for its agricultural embeddedness and chronic subsidy challenges, was one of the least attractive and pragmatic choices for reform advocates. Considering a feeble external push and forceful internal resistance, the state has undertaken partial electricity reforms to comply with legislative mandates from the central government. Despite limited reforms, Punjab has made substantive progress on electricity access, quality of supply, and some operational efficiencies. This chapter in ‘Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States’ analyses how the power sector has evolved in Punjab, especially through institutional restructuring and policy reforms, with the objective to examine the policy choices, outcomes, winners, and losers at the state level. It analyses the political–economic drivers for these policy choices and how they deviate from or comply with signals from the central government. Building on these findings, it also discusses the implications of past experiences and prevailing power dynamics for ongoing and future reforms.

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Poverty in the Midst of Abundance: Repressive Populism, Bureaucratization, and Supply-side Bias in Madhya Pradesh’s Power Sector

Summary

Electricity reforms in Madhya Pradesh remain underreported, despite some atypical outcomes. This chapter in ‘Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States’ examines the political economy of transitions in MP’s power sector, with the objective of identifying drivers of policy choices and their outcomes. Drawing on the findings, it explains how intensive institutional restructuring has resulted in bureaucratization and consolidated state control over the sector, and discusses the resulting outcomes. It also analyses the implications of past experiences for ongoing and future reforms.

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Transforming Reforms: Hype, Hostility, and Placation in Andhra Pradesh’s Power Sector Reforms

Summary

Andhra Pradesh’s experience with electricity reforms and their political ramifications has not only been fascinating a case for political analysts, but also have influenced reform approaches in other states. This chapter in ‘Mapping Power (‘Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India’s States’ explores the political economy of AP’s electricity sector transitions over four periods, with the objective to explain the drivers of policy choices and their outcomes. Drawing on the findings, it discusses the transformations in electricity reform strategy over two phases of reforms and analyses the implications of past experiences for ongoing reforms in the sector.

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Climate Change through the Lens of Energy Transformation

This chapter, published in ‘New Earth Politics: Essays from the Anthropocene’, explores existing conversations around energy transformation for a New Earth and puts forward ideas toward a conversation that might bridge the divide between how energy is supplied (how we produce) versus those who emphasize the demand side (how we use). The author approaches the problem by looking at four overarching narrative frames around energy and the implications of each for how energy is institutionalized and how it might be transformed. The four narrative frames explored are are ​​climate change, energy security, energy poverty, and local environmental pollution.

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Introduction to the Special Issue: Governing Energy in a Fragmented World

Summary

This special issue brings together leading experts from Asia, Europe and North America to examine the international institutions, national governance mechanisms and financing systems that together will determine the future of the energy sector. The enormous environmental externalities imposed by fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the devastating corruption and human rights abuses that have accompanied this energy system, and the geopolitical vulnerabilities that have arisen because of the uneven natural distribution of these resources, have occasioned enormous handwringing – but not, yet, a shift to a more rational system of providing energy services. Although national governments play the dominant role in energy governance, these challenges are beyond the scope of any single national government to manage, making energy policy a key component of global governance and international relations.

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From Norm-Taker to Norm-Maker? Indian Energy Governance in Global Context

Summary

This article examines how India’s domestic energy challenges have been shaped by global forces and how, in turn, India has engaged and is likely to engage in discussions of global energy governance. A central theme is that exploring India’s engagement in global energy governance requires a clear understanding of its domestic energy context and how this has changed over time. The article develops three narratives that have guided Indian energy governance domestically: state control; the grafting on of market institutions; and the embryonic linkage between energy security and climate change. In all these phases, Indian energy has been strongly influenced by global trends, but these have been filtered through India’s political economy, creating outcomes that constrain future policy implementation. This path dependent story also carries implications for India’s engagement with global energy governance. With the rise of a new narrative around energy security, increasingly leavened with invocations of clean energy, India is positioned to reformulate its engagement in global debates. However, the perceived need, strategic clarity and resultant eagerness to engage in the task are all limited.

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The Electricity Groundwater Conundrum: Case for a Political Solution to a Political Problem

Summary

Low cost and low quality electricity for agriculture contributes to erosion of electricity distribution systems and encourages wasteful consumption, even as farmers are increasingly deprived of adequate and good quality power. While past efforts to solve this problem have focused on technocratic approaches, this paper attempts to articulate a political interpretation of the electricity-groundwater conundrum. The paper argues that farmers are quite rational in their current decision-making given the problematic context within which they make choices. It outlines a more explicitly political approach to the problem, based on state level bargains between stakeholders and a multifaceted approach to implementing bargains.

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Regulatory Practice and Politics: Lessons from Independent Regulation in Indian Electricity

Summary

Although independent regulatory agencies are emerging worldwide, there remains little understanding about how they operate in practice, particularly in developing countries. This paper seeks to examine the practice of electricity regulation in India, using case studies of three state-level electricity regulators. Based on documentary analysis and interviews with regulators, government, utilities and stakeholders, the paper examines how regulation is shaped by institutional and political context, how regulators make decisions in practice, and how they engage with stakeholders and with what effects. Based on the Indian experience, we suggest that in a rapidly changing electricity sector, the separation between the political and economic content of regulatory decisions, as is often advocated, may not be feasible or indeed desirable. Instead, we suggest a more proactive regulatory approach where governments give regulators the latitude to proactively steer the sector. For this approach to be viable, regulators need to build adequate technical capacity, institutional legitimacy, and democratic legitimacy in their dealings with stakeholders. This approach entails a bolder, and more challenging vision of regulation, but one that promises greater transformational potential than does the model of technocratic and apolitical regulation.

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