When the BJD went out in full force to protest the rising price of LPG cylinders earlier this week, the ruling party was on target. At Rs 1,100, a full cylinder seems a daunting procurement for the common man. Odisha’s per capita income in 2022-23 was Rs 1,50,676 which translates to about Rs 12,556 a month. An LPG cylinder eating almost a tenth of it burns a big hole in the pocket.
But the offensive against the not-so-humble cooking gas cylinder was targeted at something else. Since Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who formerly headed the Petroleum and Natural Gas ministry, had trained the guns at the Odisha government over acute power outages and referred to the surplus energy status of the state, the BJD chose the NDA government’s flagship Ujjwala Scheme as a payback against the Centre.
At the centre of the BJD-BJP fight was ‘power’. Or was it Tata Power, the corporate entity that manages the four distribution companies in the state whose management efficiency came into question following frequent shutdowns? Truth be told, it was the state’s Energy Minister Pratap Keshari Deb whose alleged defence of the power situation in the state – particularly in the capital city Bhubaneswar – sent the BJD down the confrontation path with BJP.
Much of it has to do with this year’s climate. The summer arrived early and has been pretty unforgiving. If the national weather office is to be believed, the heat wave footprints have doubled in the state this year. With mercury on the ascendency, demand for power shot up.
That’s when Tata Power’s utilities found themselves under a microscope. With complaints of poor quality of power, and unscheduled shutdowns coming thick and fast, Deb had to face a barrage of questions. Of his many responses, one stuck with the media. When asked the reasons behind frequent power cuts, the minister chose to say: “We are an energy-surplus state. There are no power cuts in the state. These are only trips.”
With the summer turning the heat on, the unscheduled outages surged and people’s misery compounded. While Deb stuck to his ‘trips’ gun, it was soon dubbed as his defence of Tata Power’s poor performance. But when a summer storm hit Bhubaneswar and caused much damage to power infrastructure, things boiled over.
Opposition political parties looking for an opportunity to target the government found the perfect platform. Statewide rallies and demonstrations followed stingy criticism of the government’s handling of the power sector in which the Naveen Patnaik government has invested hundreds of crores of rupees in the last two decades and claims to be a champion of energy reforms.
Technically speaking, Deb was not far off the mark on the ‘call it trip and not power cut’ response. But there was a certain lack of empathy in his tone towards the plight of the power-consuming public which did not go down well. On the contrary, chief secretary Pradeep Jena chastising TPCODL on social media for tardy restoration did strike a chord with denizens struggling without electricity.
On its part, Tata Power had a misstep of one too many. The distribution utility has remained rather opaque to people’s grievances. That it does not have a local face and seemed to call the shots from corporate headquarters did no good to its reputation during the crisis. The power company which completed its third year in the state had little experience of operation in rural markets and should have done its groundwork in consumer relations.
But at the end of it, the distribution utilities are a joint venture with the government’s stakes at 49 per cent. A bit more compassion towards people suffering in the summer would not have done any harm and as a people’s representative and minister in the department, Deb should have been seized of that sentiment.
Siba Mohanty
Resident Editor, Odisha
sibamohanty@newindianexpress.com