Blackout In Bhagalpur

IT probably has more electricians per square kilometre than any other town in India. Roadside vegetable vendors sell kerosene lamps, booksellers stock gas-lamps and you can clinch a deal for a pair of monster batteries used to run invertors at the barber's or the STD booth. The people of Bhagalpur in north Bihar have, as a class, improvised. They don't have a choice, really. Not when you get about nine hours of electricity in 24. At best. In the winter. During summer the power supply ranges between three and six hours. It has spawned a sub-culture of powerlessness.

Enter the city limits on a cold winter evening and you don't even know that you have; it is enveloped in darkness. Till the acrid smell of burnt fuel fills the air. And your eyes get accustomed to seeing in the dull light of the odd 60 watt bulb that hangs outside the one-room tenements that line the main road. And your ears pick up the persistent clank and throb of ancient contraptions that pass for generators. It stays with you, the smell and the noise. Even after you have left. But that is not an option for a majority of the residents of Bhagalpur.

Such as Ravikant Mishra who runs an STD booth in the Tilkamanjhi area. In his early 30s now, he says he doesn't remember a time when things were different. He does remember having nursed a grouse for years because he never found out what happened to Jaya Bhaduri's dreams of marital bliss the second time around in Sholay. "The damn power kept failing and the generator at the cinema hall wasn't working. I was only a kid and my father refused to give me the money to see the movie again." He finally learnt of the tragedy at a cinema hall in Patna, where he had gone to visit his cousins.

Then there is Roop Kumar, whose family owns one of the two cinema halls in the Bhagalpur city centre. The theatre runs on a generator. "But it does take some time to get the genset working and if there are two or three power failures during the course of the film, the people start tearing up the seats and damaging the fittings. We have had to take out the cushioned chairs from the theatre and replace them with wooden planks to prevent damage," he adds. Worth a sociological study on the connection between the instinct for violence and lack of power? "There has never been enough generation of electricity but the problem got really bad during the 1970s. In 1977 the Bihar government announced a 75 per cent relief in electricity dues for the people of Bhagalpur. After that the collections have been dismal. Because those who have had to pay their dues since, demand similar relief. We are met with a point-blank refusal when we ask for dues to be paid and sometimes we get thrashed. Even when we do disconnect the line—we have had an average of 15-20 disconnections a month this year—the people just tap the main pole illegally," says Mohammed Shoaib Ansari, of the Mujahidpur electricity office, Bhagalpur.

Apart from the widespread use of kerosene lamps, gas-lamps, batteries, and invertors, nearly all the localities in Bhagalpur have a couple of toughs who have procured massive generators from which they give out connections to houses and shops. At Rs 5 a 'point'. Individual ownership of generators is rare and limited to those at the top of the heap—businessmen, doctors and lawyers. No surprise; the daily rental for a generator is upwards of Rs 150.

But nobody lets out the expensive three-phase generators used by the thousands of predominantly Muslim weavers to work their powerlooms. "The demand for exports has been falling and combined with the power situation, it has meant that most of us have had to give up our traditional occupation and look for jobs," says Mohammed Naushad, now an odd-jobs man in a hotel.

Among those who have carried on, the lack of electricity has brought them perilously close to ruin. Some of the better off weavers have pooled resources and bought a generator. But for those like Anwar-ul-Haq and his two brothers, it is becoming impossible to survive. "I sleep, eat, even carry out my ablutions depending on the power supply. The moment it comes back, we rush to our looms and work as much as possible," says Anwar.

The weavers run the attendant risk of getting their clothes or a limb caught in the machinery when they sit at their looms half-asleep under a flickering tubelight. There seems to a couple of weavers in every locality who have lost an arm or a leg.

Even the Bhagalpur Medical College and Hospital is not spared. "We have a generator which the medical superintendent says can be used only if we have to operate. Normally, we work with emergency lights and lamps. To top it all we are regularly assaulted by relatives and friends of a patient we are unable to save, for not trying hard enough. I don't think I can stick it out here," says an intern at the hospital who pleaded anonymity.

For Bhagalpur, the lack of power means, in real terms, that children are unable to study, the incidence of crime is high and nabbing culprits who, in the words of a local constable, "disappear into the darkness", is a tough call. Then there is the effect on industry—a number of units in the Berari Industrial Area three km from town face closure due to the poor power supply.

The situation in the adjoining rural areas is even worse. Some villages like Daugachi and Rajpur are around 250 km east of the state capital but go there after 6 pm on a winter evening, and you are hundreds of miles from everywhere. It is very dark.

But at the Sabour grid sub-station, which supplies electricity to Bhagalpur district, supply-side economics is being given a new twist. Says A.K. Das, assistant supervisor: "The demand from Bhagalpur town is 25 MW to 27 MW and from the district as a whole, it is about 36 MW to 39 MW. Our capacity is 40 MW but most of the time we can't meet the demand. Even when we are working at full capacity, it is not advisable to meet the demand. Because when we do, as on Diwali last year, within a few days the demand started increasing; people start using more gadgets and appliances. At this rate the demand from Bhagalpur will hit 45 MW in a few years and then where will we be?" That, perhaps, sums up the Bhagalpur way of dealing with the demand-supply crisis.