Actually load shedding is planned power cuts. I have seen a schedule published in a newspaper with different regions of the city (not Delhi) and times when no electricity will be available. This is for ppl to plan their day
Example from year 2003 (city = Pune) [1]. Its hard to read
Excerpt:
The load shedding schedule is as follows:
Group A: Monday 8 am to 11 am, Tuesday 11 am to 2 pm,Wednesday 3 to 6 pm, Saturday 11 am to 2 pm: Navi Peth, Gultekdi I and II, Dhankawdi, Padmawati, Old Parvati I and II, SNDT, G Block, Parsi agiary, City Apollo, Sant Tukaram, Kharalwadi.
Group B: Monday 11 am to 2 pm, Tuesday 3 pm to 6 pm, Friday 8 am to 11 am
It is better to have electricity 24x7 but only 50 watts to run a fridge, phone charger and one lightbulb, than to have electricity 3 hours a day but be running 1000 watts of airconditioners.
I guess perhaps energy theft was too hard to police?
“And there was no penalty for not paying—there were no regulations allowing the utilities to cut off a customer’s power.”
Nowadays, power cuts are announced via SMS in advanced. Before, this was not the case.
Would reconsider if INC appoint someone competent like Shashi Tharoor.
IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt alleged that at a meeting on the night of February 27, 2002, Modi told senior police that Hindus should be allowed to "vent their anger." Another officer, R.B. Sreekumar, said he was denied a promotion for criticizing the government's inaction
Both are dubious characters with conflict of interests and one of them even straight up went against an innocent scientist just to massage his fat ego.
Has BBC made any fucking documentary on this? No it has not.
Nor will losers like you question the blatant hypocrisy and propaganda.
> The internal UK government report concluded that the violence was pre-planned and that the rioting had all the hallmarks of "ethnic cleansing," alleging that Modi was "directly responsible" for the political climate that allowed it
"Internal UK government report" belongs in the dustbin.
> all the hallmarks of "ethnic cleansing,"
Please elucidate what those hallmarks are. I am extremely curious to know what the yardstick is for "ethnic cleansing" according to UK government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots
Perpetrators - Indian National Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
And if you want lessons on riot control, learn from Kerala. North Kerala is host to an uncountable number of Hindu-Muslim riot triggers but most of them are defused before they can take root, and if they do occur, the riots are curbed in a day or so.
This one is the most recent and deadliest riot in Kerala - defused in 2 days before it could escalate because of timely police action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marad_massacre
And this is the entry for the Gujarat riots - Perpetrators: Government of Gujarat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence
To quote some extracts :
> Throughout the violence, attacks were made in full view of police stations and police officers who did not intervene.[15] In many instances, police joined the mobs in perpetrating violence. At one Muslim locality, of the twenty-nine deaths, sixteen were caused by police firing into the locality.[18] Some rioters even had printouts of voter registration lists, allowing them to selectively target Muslim properties.[66][75][65] Selective targeting of properties was shown by the destruction of the offices of the Muslim Wakf board which was located within the confines of the high security zone and just 500 meters from the office of the chief minister.[61]
> The violence had been planned far in advance, and that similar to other instances of communal violence the Bajrang Dal, the VHP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) all took part in the attacks.[64] Following the attack on the train the VHP called for a statewide bandh (strike), and the state took no action to prevent this.[61][62]
> The Concerned Citizens Tribunal (CCT) report includes testimony of the then Gujarat BJP minister Haren Pandya (since murdered), who testified about an evening meeting convened by Modi the evening of the train burning. At this meeting, officials were instructed not to obstruct the Hindu rage following the incident.[109][110] The report also highlighted a second meeting, held in Lunawada village of Panchmahal district, attended by state ministers Ashok Bhatt, and Prabhatsinh Chauhan, among other BJP and RSS leaders, where "detailed plans were made on the use of kerosene and petrol for arson and other methods of killing."[70][110] The Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind claimed in 2002 that some regional Congress workers collaborated with the perpetrators of the violence.[111]
> Dipankar Gupta believes that the state and police were clearly complicit in the violence, but that some officers were outstanding in the performance of their duties, such as Himanshu Bhatt and Rahul Sharma. Sharma was reported to have said "I don't think any other job would have allowed me to save so many lives."[112] Human Rights Watch has reported on acts of exceptional heroism by Hindus, Dalits and tribals who tried to protect Muslims from the violence.
Don't repeat BS talking points that the government couldn't do anything. If the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, it has lost its legitimacy. That's literally one of the main jobs of the people in power.
Oh, and what did Gujarat do to Rahul Sharma, the IIT grad police officer who was one of the few officers to actually try to stop the riots? They transferred him.
> Can we not call it the Sikh riots? Those were riots by Congress and its supporters against the Sikhs. The Sikhs didn't rise up. You don't call the Gujarat riots the "Muslim riots" do you?
Why did the riots even begin in the first place? Because Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by her two Sikh body guards. It was as revenge for Operation Bluestar which targeted Khalistani terrorists who had taken over the Golden Temple. Now I have no love for Congress or Gandhi family but you cannot exclude the history from it or cherry pick it according to your liking. Khalistani terrorism was at its peak during that period. Just look at the history of how many Hindus were killed during the militancy in Punjab.
> You don't call the Gujarat riots the "Muslim riots" do you?
It is not a name I have given. I did not decide to name 1984 riots as Sikh or Anti-Sikh riots. I did not decide to name 2002 riots as Gujarat riots. That is literally what it is called. There is no reason to get so butthurt about the name.
> And if you want lessons on riot control, learn from Kerala. North Kerala is host to an uncountable number of Hindu-Muslim riot triggers but most of them are defused before they can take root, and if they do occur, the riots are curbed in a day or so.
LMFAO this is the worst state when it comes to controlling riots. It tolerated Moplah Genocide of all things. Lasted several months.
> This one is the most recent and deadliest riot in Kerala - defused in 2 days before it could escalate because of timely police action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marad_massacre
This is not a riot mate. This is a terror attack. Do you not know the difference between a riot and a terror attack?
> Don't repeat BS talking points that the government couldn't do anything. If the government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, it has lost its legitimacy. That's literally one of the main jobs of the people in power.
I never said Government couldn't do anything. Are you unable to comprehend what I wrote? I wrote politicians have no power to stop riots. It is only the military (which is also part of the Government) that has the power.
Second, very laughable of you to call out the Moplah rebellion, which happened in the 1910s lol. Are you still stuck in the British Raj, pre-WW1?
Third, Marad was a riot, except it was extinguished in a day (by a North Indian Hindu top cop by the way), because of timely action by the police in actually discovering the weapons. What could've been a terror attack was averted.
> I wrote politicians have no power to stop riots. It is only the military (which is also part of the Government) that has the power.
And fourthly, no riots in any democracy across the world are controlled by the military lol. The military serves a different purpose, and using them for tasks such as riot control is exactly how you end up with another Tiananmen Square massacre (in which case, the military were explicitly called because the civilian police of Beijing did not want to shoot and kill the protesters). Perhaps that's where your mind is, to make India another one-party Hindutva dictatorship.
My edits were taken from the Wikipedia article only.
Thanks for confirming you are part of the propaganda. I have no further interest in continuing this discussion with a lunatic.
> My edits were taken from the Wikipedia article only.
Your edits even in the Wikipedia article call it "dubious". You still mentioned it anyway, without mentioning that the claim is dubious, because you are part of the propaganda machine.
> And fourthly, no riots in any democracy across the world are controlled by the military lol
It infact IS controlled by the military. In US, for example, it is called National Guard. Police is not equipped to control a riot in any democracy in the World. India is actually an exception where it has a CRPF for riots and because scale of riots in India exceeds even the CRPF's ability to handle it (due to our size and population), the Military is called.
> Second, very laughable of you to call out the Moplah rebellion, which happened in the 1910s lol.
Moplah Genocide was not part of the rebellion. Unless you want to call Muslims genociding Hindus and raping Hindu women as part of rebellion against the British Raj. Have some shame. And it happened in 1921 not 1910.
This I think is a standard practice in any large office building in France (Europe? Global?) too, regardless of the frequency of the power cuts. I don't remember witnessing any power cuts in the office (not since long ago anyway), but in most of the places there are systematically white and red sockets, red ones being powered through a UPS. So, server machines go into red ones. Well, we don't have servers anymore, but the sockets are still there anyway. Hopefully UPS too, LOL.
The building might be on a generator. The whole building is most assuredly not on UPS.
Even in hospitals only certain outlets are on UPS - the stuff that absolutely cannot be interrupted - though a lot of hospital equipment now has its own battery system, at least in part for convenience.
I don't know if it's still done but semiconductor plants used to use intertia-based grid smoothing/UPS systems to handle millisecond-level interrupts and voltage fluctuations.
It's almost like grid inertia is a different problem from matching changes in demand, and nuclear really sucks at the latter...
Putting computer systems on UPSs isn't a Europe thing. Backup generators and UPS units are very common, or at least they were until everyone got infatuated with moving all their data "into the cloud" and stopped maintaining, or building, infrastructure in office space for it.
Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.
But hey, it was cheaper, right?
Oops...
Genuine question - how did people sleep there pre-AC?
Short answer is that you get used to it. There was a surprisingly effective swamp cooler that worked about half the time (we got pretty good at troubleshooting it) and several ancient pedestal fans. You can sleep in very nearly any environment once you become sufficiently sleep-deprived.
Thankfully, I stayed in a nice hotel with an automatic generator, so the power would cut out for a second or two before the generator came on, and then would cut back out for a second or two a few minutes later when the hotel went back on the mains.
The birth rate falling is a VERY good thing. India cannot really support more than 300-400 million people with a high quality of life with its geographic size and exhausted resources. Life becomes cheaper than disposable toilet paper otherwise.
Source for this carrying capacity?
India has roughly ~18% of humanity but only about 4% of global freshwater resources, and agriculture consumes roughly 80–90% of India's water. The World Bank estimates that around 600 million Indians already face water stress. (The number is actually higher in many estimates)
https://www.worldbank.org/en/brief/2026/03/19/how-india-is-a...
There is also substantial pressure on land. Government data report about 97.85 million hectares, or ~30% of India's geographical area, as affected by land degradation/desertification.
https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?lang=2®=...
If you want long-term, sustainable agriculture, we need to heavily move to organic farming. This yields ~30% less food produce. I forgot the popular paper on this - can dig it up.
India has also exhausted its mineral reserves. This is not fully our fault. We were fully strip mined and utterly bankrupted by the British in WW2. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?lang=2®=...
(IMHO that is the real reason why we got independence - the Brits didn't want to keep holding to a distressed asset and immediately liquidated. Look at Bengal famine of 1943)
We are having heavy import dependency on minerals - a ridiculous 80%!!! dependency, which is causing significant problems in our trade/current-account deficit.
So, if we want maximum ecological comfort, and long-term, prosperous standard of living, we need a significantly reduced population. You can get the number by just halving our population simply taking into account high-availability to water and then reduce further for sustainable agriculture and sustainable mineral consumption.
This is deeply unsupported by the evidence I’ve seen. Organic farming tends to look far more resource intensive than modern methods. Often for little discernible gain in flavor and nutrition.
> You can get the number by just halving our population
I agree with your conclusion given the data, particularly around mineral exhaustion. (Though there is also the issue of severe mismatches. Lots of lithium, for example, yet no battery industry to speak of.)
Not normal. Not encouraged. Not the trend line. You’re projecting a problem from other countries onto a demographic context within which it doesn’t exist. Unfortunately this is a topic where one has to actually look at the numbers.
I mean Mumbai's population is 10x Paris population, so this should be obvious.
I can fault India (and, in particular, Modi) for repeating the same mistake all other western developed countries made 40 years before, yes.
made 40 years... before they (India) started developing.
Western countries were at the forefront of this already in the 80s. India, starting to develop much later, had a big time buffer to learn from that and at least attempt to avoid it.
Effective and safe Birth control is something that has never before existing in human history (with the possible exception of a specific plant during the Roman Empire which was driven to extinction due to over harvesting), and which society doesn’t really have a decent answer to address in a stable fashion yet. As clearly demonstrated by the upcoming demographic collapse.
The short term incentives this provides to women (and men who benefit in the short term as well) is just too powerful to fully contain, despite all the attempts from the powerful religious groups in India.
The long term consequences of having everyone (men and women) competing for the same jobs, lack of sustainable long term population demographics, removing many consequences of promiscuous sexual behavior, etc. only show up once the western approach has played out for multiple generations. Until then, it’s a way to juice the numbers.
They held out much longer than western society did, and society still goes to extreme lengths to attempt to restrain it, but it still has had widespread effect regardless. They still haven’t experienced the long term effects, and I bet they would love to juice the numbers more as India is a very hard place to live now.
They are still living with the very real pain of ‘the old approach’.
The even more powerful religious groups in the Middle East, and social/tribal groups in Africa, being the only ones ‘still standing’ on this front, but it’s inevitable there too.
Conservatism may attempt to slow the spread, but eventually even the tribal groups of mountainous Afghanistan will have to deal with the same issues that the most left wing liberal folks currently are grappling with - what is the point/long term future this is leading too?
The current Hedonic nihilism of a lot of folks in the west tends to not be long term self sustaining. Very addictive in the short term though!
It isn’t clear what is going to emerge as the alternative.
What would ‘children of men’ be like if the same thing was happening - but it was because of a voluntary pill or implant every woman was taking instead of some big mystery illness?
The one benefit of living in India is cheap household labour...only possible because of a massive underclass of people!
There are 1.2 billion Indians.
But of course that also makes blaming Modi pretty silly - every country sees this happening as their economic and social conditions improves. We don't know of any way of stopping it short of maybe throwing people into poverty.
(the only remaining places that has not yet dropped below replacement is sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they too are seeing birth rates drop).
The reaction to that idea shows you how undervalued baby production still is. Morons insist that $20k or similar is enough incentive. It's laughable.
Whatever happens with AI "taking all the jobs", this will drive real societal change, because it has to. The options are obscene authoritarianism and removal of bodily autonomy from women so we can just force them to reproduce like society is used to, or actually adapting to what it will cost to encourage women to go through literal trauma and 20 years of really hard work because the rest of society will benefit. Seeing as de-facto enslaving all women is horrific, I hope people see that we should do everything to avoid the first option.
It has to become very attractive to be an average person, with average social standing, with average resources. The uber rich might have to give up some of their share of the pie.
It is possible going significantly higher could, but if so we have not yet figured out how high, and it's clear the threshold is much higher than people have tended to think it would be. E.g. look at financial incentives in Hungary, or the welfare system in places like Norway that makes parental leave in many developed countries look like third world conditions.
Rich people do seem to have a somewhat higher fertility rate, so it is possible that you could fund it enough, but the rise happens at high enough income levels I don't think our economy could handle it.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though - I just don't think we know if purely financial motivation would be sufficient at a level that is actually possible (and I do fear authoritarian approaches will end up being tried instead). It might take a lot more effort than that in terms of lightening the burden and/or making it more attractive in other ways.
If child rearing is a full time job maybe we can treat it like one.
You see, I know it's hard to grasp for some, but everything is really relative.
Your ratios are all wrong. There are about 500mm Indians aged 6 to 26 today who will be over 80 (and under 100) by 2100. Even if nobody dies, India isn’t hitting 1.2bn 80-year olds. As for under-18s in that timeline, it ranges from 100 to 500 million depending on fertility.
Put another way, there is no deterministic population collapse in India the way there almost must be in Korea and Germany.
I'd prefer if it didn't have to go through this at all. Knowing you are headed for bad times isn't something to live with, it's something to fix. And it's not like the birth rates in each state are staying the same, they are actively dropping. The issue isn't just there, it's also getting worse.
Then don't raise them! Also, don't raise problems that are easily disproven with real numbers! Demographics is a terrible domain to vibe your way through.
> Knowing you are headed for bad times isn't something to live with, it's something to fix
I literally just showed you that demographic projections for India give realistic scenarios for the number of under-18 year olds being equal to the number of over-80 year olds by 2100. The worst case is a 5:1 ratio.
exactly. so in 2150, or 2200, or someday, it will be a problem. So yes, it is a problem even today. It's kind of why you don't stand on train tracks even if there are still 15 minutes.
Future problems need to be fixed, else you end up as the countries you listed, Korea and Germany. It's not that hard
Smooth population decline means much less contention on ressources, energy and living space, which is highly relevant when all of those are already somewhat at the limit.
Significant positive growth is clearly completely unsustainable even over centuries, and I don't see why a somewhat smaller total human population could not be just as successful/satisfied over the next decades.
Incorrect. It is 1.48 billion and expected to hit 1.7+ billion in next three decades in a nation that is <1/3rd size of the USA. Birth rate collapse cannot come soon enough.
The only thing I know about India is from a Big Bang Theory episode where Raj's father said to Leonard when asked how's the weather, "It's hot, it's always hot in India!".
I don't personally know that the statement is true, but if that's your issue you should be criticizing the writer, not the actor.
I wonder how many HNers are, or ever have been there in the first place? It seems strange to me to ask who "recalls" what it was like there before. What would such a recollection be based on? There's only so much attention one can pay to what daily life is reportedly like around the world, and that required believing the reports.
India accounts for a big portion of the english speaking internet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if half the posters here are Indian origin.
It’s as though all wealth and progress hinge on taking from others.
Also it would also avoid such incidents.
Minister blames monkey for Sri Lanka nationwide power cut
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8d92n28pqjo
Infrastructure projects, whether big or small should always factor in local ecosystem. For example, highways built with with overpasses and underpasses are a great help to animals.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/samruddhi-fo...
India can adopt plug-in standards, solar and batteries. I guess most people use some form of battery (UPS/Inverter) anyways, so the idea is familiar.
Rooftop is known and it can continue to grow. Next, add vertical solar. This will add ~4 hours of solar production.
Required gated communities to be self sufficient or net producers. Cover the surfaces of all high rises with vertical panels. Require these communities to have BESS and EV charging for all car parking. This adds two layers of storage. BESS instead of diesel generators. Add outlet for induction stove. No need of piped gas. I've seen villa communities where most homes are net producers, these ideas are happening, need to be standardized as regulation. Easiest thing is to create standards for the gated communities, which can be enforced.
Don't build rural transmission infrastructure. They can be offgrid, using solar and batteries. It is not worth the cost to build and maintain transmission and distribution infrastructure to millions of small villages.
Work towards regulating uber/rapido to require EV cars. These drive the most miles in cities and would do wonders.
Lots of scope for growth.
Most of India has a solar capacity factor >0.2 and low seasonality. That means even 5kW peak rooftop panels and a 10 kWh battery will get you over 95% almost always. And panels+labor is so cheap in India, there's really no reason not to just tile the roof in panels.
Things get more difficult in dense cities, if you have multi story apartment blocks going 90+% locally is impossible. But then just transmit power from lower density rooftops, or actual solar farms.
And this already assumes widespread AC (really no way to increase electrification this much and not add AC in that climate).
India’s Clean Energy Boom Halts Coal Power Growth - https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Indias-Cl... - September 18th, 2026
Ember Energy: India - https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/india/ - Last Updated: June 4th, 2026
Ember Energy: Battery storage is now cheap enough to unleash India’s full solar potential - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/battery-storage-is-... - April 7th, 2026 ("Ember’s analysis shows how solar and battery storage can meet as much as 90% of India’s electricity demand at lower LCOE than the average power purchase costs in most states.")
- Solar and batteries could supply 90% of India’s electricity demand at a competitive LCOE of around INR 5.06/kWh ($56/MWh).
- 4.9 GW of solar and 13.5 GWh of battery capacity for every 1 GW average demand load is enough to meet 83-92% of annual electricity demand in the ten largest states.
- 7 of India’s largest states by electricity demand can meet 90-92% of their demand with solar and batteries at an LCOE between INR 4.96–5.09/kWh ($55–56/MWh).
Ember Energy: India’s electrotech fast-track: where China built on coal, India is building on sun - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-... - January 22nd, 2026
- 27% of India’s electricity was generated from clean sources in 2025. It was the 3rd largest country by electricity demand.
- As of March 2026, India was one of only ten countries planning to triple non-fossil generation capacity from 2022 levels by 2030. By December 2025, the country had achieved 258 GW of installed renewables capacity, making progress towards its 2030 goal of 500 GW. Ember analysis suggests that, under current plans, renewables would reach 42% of generation by 2030.
Interesting solar PV facts (as of this comment):
- Wood Mackenzie estimates Chinese solar manufacturing capacity at roughly 1.36TW.
- By the end of 2025, installed small-scale solar capacity worldwide had reached ~1.2TW.
- While solar does not generate at full capacity around the clock, the installed total is about three times the size of the global nuclear fleet.
- Ember Energy expects Africa to add about 17GW of solar this year.
- In the Philippines, rooftop solar capacity may have nearly doubled in the 12 months through April, rooftop systems generated 372 gigawatt hours in the first six months of the year and residential systems can now pay for themselves there in a little more than three years.
- India is scaling rooftop systems through a national subsidy program launched in February 2024. The program has installed panels on more than 5 million homes and is adding about 500,000 homes a month.
Much has been made of Estonia having a high tech virtual government I’d. So many high tech start ups have come from Estonia, I’m a bit stunned that they have big electricity distribution problems.
We do not have issues with electricity here or planned power cuts or whatever else.
I would like to see where this professor got his data for losses from. Maybe his data is flawed.
Even if Estonia does have stated electricity distribution loss, it still looks so way out of place in this group of countries by so many criteria. I wonder why not pick Egypt or Libya given that they have the same distribution loss.
Edit: this could be the reason - when you click on "Map" above the graph, for some reason Estonia is one of the blue countries shown on the map. Argentina, Brazil, and Kenya are there too (but not others).
'kaod' is losses, this table shows losses from bruto production.
Either someone has been sending wrong data to the world bank or there is some issue with interpreting them before importing to world bank.
But at 2.9% according to Eesti's electricity supplier: https://www.elering.ee/en/electricity-consumption-and-genera...
"In 2024, losses accounted for 2.9% of the total amount of electricity supplied to the transmission system." What does it all mean, who knows.
https://www.ceer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/3rd-CEER-Repo...
I did push back hard saying that that's not the same as what the article talked about at all.
The thing is if the World Bank is making statistics people are basing decisions on this is an issue.
"Oh, you sweet summer child"
I also doubt Estonia has any of these issues whatsoever, like energy theft.
It really seems like a vibecoded article with numbers informing incorrect conclusions. Perhaps with a dash of nationalistic pride. Unfortunate from IEEE.
----
[1] much like we do in the UK, but that is because our national grid is a privatised mess effectively run by external concerns (EDF have their fingers in the pie, for one example) charging us much more than they can get away with in their home markets.
You can steal as much as you want. The ones who pay will pay.
You'd be amazed at how most of this sort of thing is not done by the same people you blame for everything.
I mean, it's very low effort to have somebody else do all the work. But you'll never see a self-employed electrician creating an account in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes.
Until solar panels came to liberate us from the utility overlords.
A failed state will be fail-stating regardless of the technology.
It is the places where the grid is failing where solar panels indeed liberate you, but not from the utility overlords, but from incompetent and corrupt governance.
There's usually an incentive to solve this though because this shrinkage, in retail terms, would be handled at the cost of power generated (without any profit margin) whereas if it was sold to a paying customer it'd have a margin built in. If the Greek utilities are allowed to make a profit on that losses line item, that is insane
However there's kind of a funny part to it that I read on the last page of New Scientist some years ago. According to that story, Singapore has by far the lowest rate of accidental line cuts - it's a step change to almost zero from the next best country. Apparently there's a worldwide organization that meets to discuss these things. At one meeting the Singaporean engineers presentation was eagerly anticipated but as he was going through his points the engineers from other countries were impatient - they know and do all this! Until he got to his final point: accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence. Hence the difference.
I assumed it was something like that when I saw the graph for Singapore. They achieve the veneer of a perfectly clean and orderly society by punitive intolerance of anything else.
I wonder if something in the middle could work. I feel like if you are legally responsible for a construction job and dig into the forbidden spaghetti that a little bit of mandatory community service isn't exactly an extreme response.
Inb4 (in this case in-after) trope answers (see below) like 'veneer of perfectly clean and orderly society', 'punitive'. It is small; that is why it can get stuff done.
Amazing that places have 50% power loss.
Bill collectors are openly threatened by local elected leaders even in the presence of police.
The state chief minister(similar to a governor) acknowledged the problem and is planning to handover bill collection to a private firm specifically for that part of the city. The opposition is against the move as the area represents a major voting bloc.
Sometimes, policy based solutions work but political will is also necessary to enforce those policies.
(I assume consumption per customer has probably gone up)
The government is actively encouraging solar residential and net metering is on...
Since the topic is linked to Delhi..
In dino, garche dakkan mein hain kadre sukhan bahut,
Kaun jaye Zauq, par dilli ki galiya chodd ke
The poet acknowledges that the Deccan region (South India) currently offers better patronage and respect for poets than the declining Delhi. However, he rhetorically asks who could possibly bear to leave Delhi....
This is... interesting on multiple levels.
But yes, transmission losses exist and are surprisingly large
Reducing the number of transformers, raising the high side of system voltage, and increasing conductor sizes are all ways to reduce the transmission losses. of course each of those requires investments so that's why it can be variable and also something to brag about
I don't know the real details, but my educated guess is they raised the voltage, and also they used 3x as many wires (running 3 phase past every house even though almost everybody only used 1 phase). That is I can visually see their insulators on the power posts are larger than neighboring utilities which allows for higher voltage (but may or may not mean higher voltages were used). Likewise I can see the 3 lines on each power pole while neighboring utilities only used one. It is hard to tell from the ground but I suspect they used thicker wires as well.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
For some problems, the closer you get to perfection, the harder the next step is.
In the 39 years I live here, the only power loss was due to lightning or planned power cuts because of work in the building where I live in the last 9 years ( rare - twice).
There is however incentive for our high chemistry industry to cut the power and they get re-imbursed. This is when we have too much electricity production ( solar power) vs. consumption. Otherwise the providers have to pay "fines" to lose the overproduction of electricity to neigboring countries ( who probably all have overproduction of electricity).
As of now, we cannot do lossless transmission. If some Ultragrok comes with room-pressure and room-temperature superconductors, then maybe.
But you should also acknowledge that national electrical reform was done by BJP. The real problem for Indian politics was the re-entry of the Gandhi nepo-baby dynasty. We would be a lot better off if they hadn't gotten their claws back into the INC.
I was in Delhi when this started and they began laying out the tamper-proof cable back in the early 2000s. At that time, railway food had been privatised, perhaps you recall. It wasn't better. The problem was not the privatisation or lack thereof, it was the complete lack of accountability.
Part of accountability is the possibility for failure and the associated consequences. PSUs have no fear of failure, since they're fundamentally parasitic, living as they are on the tax receipts of the beleaguered middle class. Private industry either increases efficiency to the point of profit, or goes under, simple as. Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the results!
Of course, if there is complete government capture by industry, then there is no more risk of failure, and you have privatized PSUs. But let's say this, from 1947-1991, India traded the British for the IAS. Hardly much of an improvement. The only way to reduce their power is to transfer it to the private sector, outside of areas where the utility of the activity is all externality (e.g. defense, scientific research). We have to move in this direction or risk returning to the License Raj era. Perhaps this will create more problems, but at least our children won't curse us for leaving them with our parents' problems.
Saw the same thing playing out in public transport in a few different countries, incidentally. London railways are a particularly hilarious example of what happens when you privatise without proper accountability.
Dude, you're the one coming across as a zealot here.
The License Raj prior to 1991 was pretty socialist, and it was a Congress policy.
It baffles me that country still has strong anti-capitalist views. I guess lack of education does that to people.
Also, BJP is slightly right of Congress (post 1991) when it comes to economics.
Anyway, I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of the wealthy and powerful. For instance, I personally quite dislike our new AI ruling class. But unfortunately, in India there was an attitude since independence that it is impossible to generate wealth in a legitimate manner. Which is going way too far! And has predictably bad outcomes for the country.
While the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company was, as a broad generality, not nearly so vile as (say) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_colonization_of_the_Am..., it certainly didn't leave many Indians with a favorable impression of European-style capitalism.
The various East India companies went to India (and the other east Indies) because those places had things rich Europeans desired - spices yes, but also high-end, high-quality textiles and handcrafted items. They were already the height of civilization and had high economic productivity.
> would do well to imagine the counterfactual of what India would be like had Europe never visited
It would probably not be one country. Best case scenario: like a South Asian EU. Why do you think they wouldn't have copied European industrialization and developed themselves? Japan did it. Turkey did it.
Speaking of Japan, isn't it interesting that the first Asian country to industrialize is also one of the only Asian countries never colonized by Europeans? Why do people still believe colonization was good for economic development?
IIR, Japan was a pretty xenophobic, unified, and militarized place when the Europeans showed up. And without either reputed or obvious Tier 1 riches - such as Central & South America's precious metals - to motivate a hard-fought conquest. Especially when 'most everywhere else in South & East Asia was comparatively easy pickings.
> Why do people still believe ...
Because, if you use sufficiently Eurocentric metrics, it usually was. And picking those metrics feels pretty good, if you identify uncomfortably closely with that sort of capitalism.
Other than unified, that describes most places in the 15th or 16th century.
> Because, if you use sufficiently Eurocentric metrics, it usually was.
The one country in Asia* to not suffer colonialism (Japan) is way ahead of all the others that did have it, especially on "Eurocentric" metrics such as GDP and productivity and democracy and human rights. That alone should be a rebuke to colonialism's purported development powers.
* Arguably Thailand is another but it was forced to cede land to colonial powers. It too is considerably richer than its immediate neighbors.
I don't think this is a good example, given the actual modern history of Japan.
Contemporary Japanese democracy and respect for human rights aren't indigenous Japanese developments. They were literally forced on Japan by the victorious Americans after the homegrown Japanese militarist empire, which didn't GAF about either, catastrophically lost a major war.
Japan could only start that war because of its early industrialization. Colonies didn't start WW2.
In an alternate historical timeline where Japan industrializes but doesn't start the war? It would need to have had less militaristic and xenophobic leadership in the early 20th century than it did in our timeline. And IMO that would've led to more democracy* and human rights anyway over time.
*Important to note: Even pre-WW2 Japan went from absolute monarchy to a semi-constitutional monarchy, with suffrage for all adult males granted in 1925.
Not sure what you are suggesting here.
How so?
> if you take the ancient Greeks as your yardstick
You mean the slave owners? Who only allowed free men to vote? And required property ownership to hold office?
I'm not aware of widespread slavery in India, nor a requirement to own property to hold public office. Women are allowed to vote there. They've even had a woman be Prime Minister and two women Presidents.
Goodness, there was a huge amount of slavery, back into prehistory, then lots African slaves from the 6th century, then when Islamic conquest hit almost 1000 years ago many Indians were enslaved. Just as slavery was everywhere, it was in India. The big event was in 1843 when Britain did the moral thinking and emphasis to abolish it throughout their empire and also just in general, with British ships going to war against slaver ships and the British Empire buying slaves' freedom. The two big things about India and abolition were 1) the East India Company was definitely not as morally clear as the people in England, and 2) there was a worry that ending slavery in India would be too disruptive to the local culture, it was so embedded. So it was only abolished 10 years after the rest of the Empire.
Today, with 70 years of independence and self-rule, India has the most modern slaves in the world[0].
> Women are allowed to vote there.
Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations - some, like ancient Greece, almost 2000 years prior - who did all the discovery and moral thinking for this. It's not hard to copy something, particularly when declaring it to be so is what's measured, and not how well it's implemented.
[0] https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...
The US has the most people in modern slavery in the Western hemisphere: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie....
And that's even counting Mauritania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania
"Countries with large populations have large numbers of people doing <insert illegal act>" is hardly a revelation.
> Yes, as of 1950 when democracy was copied and pasted from other civilisations
So weird that those "moral" British didn't allow Indians to vote before that. I thought you said they were the good guys!
No extant country has adopted democracy from first principles. Everyone copy-pasted it. 1950 was the first time India had the choice and chance to do it, and they took it.
No, I didn't mean that. I said if Ancient Greece is your yardstick, India would be more than 1000 years behind today without external influence. Ancient Greece was 2000 years ago, not 1000.
> The US has the most people in modern slavery in the Western hemisphere: https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie....
Okay, but it's also a huge country the size of a continent, so of course it's got more than most of Western Europe. If Luxembourg had a million modern slaves there'd be nowhere to hide them. And it has much, much more sensitive systems for detecting this sort of thing than India does, so you can imagine that number is not lowballed.
I wouldn't call the "license raj" of India as anti-capitalist. India arguably has the strongest of institutions of all the countries in South Asia. However, even its institutions and regulations are pathetically weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
You probably also saw a previous post right here on this orange website when someone tried to repatriate their business money outside of India. It was painful just to read that they had to get approvals from iirc sixteen different government agencies to get their own money that they brought in from outside of India back. Not profits, not proceeds, a fraction of what they put in.
Neither of these two cases is due to "anti-capitalist" views of India. If you look at what was India before Moghul rule and British rule, you could argue India has never been socialist before.
I think workers everywhere should have "strong anti-capitalist views", because unrestrained capitalism is just anarchy.
The problem with Indian institutions is that they are far too powerful, centralized and bureaucratic. Just read the article - the problem was created by a lazy, corrupt, powerful and centralized bureaucratic system. The solution was to dismantle it and decentralize power.
> I think that's a bad read of Indian institutions. They are incredibly powerful - in fact, they are far too powerful. That's the problem. The license raj is the epitome of authoritarian, centralized political and economic power. I suppose it was justified on socialist grounds, but it would be fair to say that saying so doesn't make it so! Before 91, nothing, and I mean nothing, could happen without government say-so. > The problem with Indian institutions is that they are far too powerful, centralized and bureaucratic. Just read the article - the problem was created by a lazy, corrupt, powerful and centralized bureaucratic system. The solution was to dismantle it and decentralize power.
What you are saying is absolutely true. the bureaucracy in India is absolutely lazy, corrupt, powerful, and centralized. It is also arguably one of the biggest reasons why India has never had a (successful) military coup. You could even argue the inefficiency and the sluggishness of the bureaucracy is a feature and not a defect.
Although they were some mistakes his government made all in all it’s been a huge success compared to the previous administrations in India.