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| For separatists power outages and suppression are two faces of same coin | | | Though Jammu and Kashmir state has
been experiencing severe power short-
age during the last over 30 years, each year adding to the demand on one hand and increasing the level of shortfall, on the other hand, separatists have belatedly reacted to prolonged outages in the Kashmir valley. Yes, it is a health change on the part of separatists, both hardliners and the moderates, to agitate against an issue that keeps on making living difficult in the state, highly difficult for the people in the Kashmir valley during the winter months, and highly tedious for the people in the Jammu region during the summer months. These separatists have invariably focussed on the Kashmir issue and while voicing concern and anger over prolonged shortage of electricity they do not hesitate giving some political colour to purely an economic problem. What is interesting is the way these separatists have treated power shortage, prompting the Government to resort to outages as another instance of repression and suppression of people. Another interesting aspect of the separatists' anger against power shedding is their charge that while people in the state, especially in the Kashmir valley, suffer because of long outages as the state has been exporting power to keep people comfortable in other Indian states.
Hurriyat G) chairman, Syed Ali Shah Gelani sees in power shortage strategy of the Government to suppress people.. He berated the state Government for not protecting the natural resources of the valley as the valley's water resources were being exploited to generate power for other Indian states. Major share of electricity produced from the valley's water bodies was being exported to the northern grid.. He ridiculed the NC led Government for promising people that it would secure internal autonomy for the state when it has not been able to fulfill peoples' demand for electricity..
Chairman APHC, Molvi Umar Farooq and the JKLF chief, Mohd. Yasin Mailk, too have accused the state Government of plundering the valley's resources for benefiting people in rest of India.. Both of them blamed the Government's inability to address the problem and said that the electricity shortage continued to worsen from year to year despite the fact that new power plants had been set up in the state during the last 20 years.
Another senior separatist, Shabir Ahmed Shah has said that power outages were part of to pressure tactics adopted by the Government of India for forcing people to accept subjugation. It seems that these separatists have either feigned ignorance or have refused the understand the basic issue that have compounded the problem of power shortage..
There are a number of factors that are responsible for power shortage in Jammu and Kashmir and if the state Government, even after spending several hundred crores of rupees every year on power purchase, has resorted to load shedding it cannot be faulted.
First of all the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan has imposed limitations and restrictions on utilizing water of the Jhelum, Chenab and the Indus for power generation.And whenever the Government frames plans for constructing new power projects on either of the rivers Pakistan raises many hurdles in the name of the Treaty. Secondly, the successive state Governments had no funds for building new power projects and had to seek central assistance for constructing several projects.
And these projects were set up under a deal that between 12 and 25 perent power, generated from these projects, would be the share of the state Government and the rest was the property of the NHPC, that built the plants. Consequently if some power, generated from state based projects was exported to the national or northern grid it was as per the agreement between the state and the NHPC. Thirdly, the transmission and distribution losses in Jammu and Kashmir has been the highest at over 47 per cent. Besides this a section of people have unauthorized and illegal electricity connections which also contributes to the power losses. The state Government has failed to upgrade the transmission system.
These separatists talk of repression and suppression of people by the Government while airing anger against power curtailment. Do people in Haryana, UP,Bihar and other states in India suffer suppression because in these states four to six- hour load shedding remains a normal feature during six rmonths of summer ? Let the separatists answer this question. |
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