Urja Pradesh?

I would tell people that if you have lived on the hills, you probably can't live in the plains. All my trips to the Delhi region have been filled with my disdain for the region and the lifestyle. I tell them that in Uttarakhand, at least we get water and electricity, and the people aren't that bad, but I am proven wrong soon after.

There were huge posters in newspapers a few days ago about the commissioning of the Maneri Bhali hydroelectric project in Uttarakhand, and they said it would go a long way in help the state meet its electricity needs. But I get back from Delhi and see that we are facing power cuts too. Makes me feel kind of stupid now considering I told people there that we are the Urja Pradesh, and we hardly have any power cuts at all, amounting to less than an hour a day. But the lights have been going out in my house a lot more, and I ain't happy about it.

President Kalam said in his book, India 2020, that India needs to cut down the T&D losses in a big way if we have to be energy efficient in the future. Unfortunately, none of the policy makers have focused in this direction at all. I believe some areas lose almost 40 to 50 percent of the power before it reaches the consumer from the power station. That is a criminal waste of electricity and our resources. The Con'gress party has been peddling the Ultra Mega Power Projects for a while, which will cost thousands of crores of rupees, but if we focused on improving our transmission and distribution infrastructure, I am sure we could save as much electricity at much less the cost. Unfortunately, no policy maker is thinking this way, and I just don't understand how the planners of this country, if they are planning at all, can't fathom the fact that India can't move forward if we don't focus on our basic infrastructure, most notable being power and water.