The massive collapse in India's power grid earlier this week — the worst in a decade, has become a bizarre Rorschach test. A power failure, albeit on a huge scale, has become a symbol of something far deeper.
Depending on who you are it came to symbolise everything from the weaknesses and failures of India's power reforms, the moral and policy failings of the eight-year reign of the UPA government, the decline of the India story, or in Team Anna's case, a massive conspiracy (to achieve exactly what was never quite clear).
The grid collapse, apparently, was nothing so trivial as the failure of a system, driven by technology, economics and politics, that was supposed to work in a certain way, but didn't.
The villains of the actual grid collapse were also quickly identified — it was a clutch of northern states, most prominent among them being Uttar Pradesh, who were accused of 'overdrawing' power from the grid, leading to its collapse. UP strenuously denied that it overdrew power, but proceeded to sack the head of the UP Power Corporation anyway.
The increasingly desperate hunt for a deeper meaning aside, the biggest problem with this picture was that it didn't quite match the evidence. What exactly happened will only emerge when the enquiry committees complete their reports.
But from the data that's emerged so far, it's becoming increasingly clear that any argument based on a few states overdrawing power from the grid is only a partial explanation at best. UP and Punjab are hardly innocent players in this whole drama, but they aren't necessarily the main players.
In a sector beset with problems, whether generation, regulatory failure or fuel supply, the huge changes in India's power transmission network in the last decade or so, is actually a success story of sorts. But with that growth in transmission capacity, came complexity, and that bought with it new risks — something the engineers and bureaucrats responsible for the system clearly recognised.
In a meeting in March 2012, the head of the central electricity authority, a key policymaking body for the sector, noted that the "Indian power system is growing manifold and their complexity is increasing on all fronts". He went on to state that "any incident — natural calamity etc, even on single element of this capacity, has the potential to cause a major grid disturbance".
A Grid to Rule Them All
Till about the middle of the last decade, India's electrical transmission grid, essentially a system to move power from suppliers (generating plants) to wholesale customers like state electricity boards, was a patchwork. It started off decades ago as a large collection of state-level networks with few if any links among states.
But beginning in the '60s, states in individual regions began to link their electrical networks with each other. This process continued gradually, but it wasn't until 2002, that connections between regions began in earnest.
Between 2002 and 2006, the northern, eastern, western and northeastern grids were all linked up through a set of transmission lines creating a power 'superhighway' across central and eastern India from Agra and Gwalior in the west towards Sasaram in Bihar .
A swathe of India, from Maharashtra and Gujarat to the North East states are now one electrical grid whose crucial artery is this superhighway. The commissioning of the Agra-Gwalior line in 2006, was the final link in closing this mega-loop. It was this Agra-Gwalior link which was to play an important part in the grid collapse.
This NEW grid (North East-East-West) is linked with the southern grid, but more loosely. By 2014, the southern states are expected to be as tightly linked with the NEW grid as other states, something which residents of those states might look upon with decidedly mixed feelings now.
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