Planting power
As summer scorches across India, people turn on fans and air conditioners, heavily increasing urban India’s consumption of power. The Delhi government expects a shortfall of over 400 MW daily in the summer months, and wrote to the power ministry asking for 300 MW over its usual allocation from May onwards for three months. One would think that this increase in demand would, in the course of things, lead to an increase in supply. Instead, electricity generation actually fell 22 per cent in April. Clearly, something is very wrong with the power sector.
Power plants blame it mostly on coal. The Confederation of Indian Industry warned as early as February that “32 power stations had coal stock to last for less than seven days, while 18 had stocks enough for less than four days, against a normal stockpile for about 21 days”. The government recently had to revise its own estimates of coal shortage till March 2012 upwards to 112 million tonnes, up from 83 million tonnes that it had estimated in December 2010. Naturally, there are important short-term measures that could be taken. For example, industry wants coal set aside for electronic auctioning to be passed on to plants with “guaranteed” supplies, at the price previously discovered through the auctions. Such measures must be seriously considered.
Arab summer
American President Barack Obama connects through his speeches. And his speech this week, in the US state department, was his biggest attempt to connect America to the Muslim world since his now famous address to Cairo University in 2009. Asserting that America “values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator”, Obama re-balanced American foreign policy, specifying that the US would “promote reform across the region”, an unequivocal statement that he must hope banishes the memory of Washington’s initial equivocation on Hosni Mubarak, when the Tahrir Square protests began. He criticised US allies, such as Yemen and Bahrain, for the first time even if still referring to them in diplomatic language as “friends” — though he desisted from mentioning Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Bahrain.
In addition to this, an extensive section reaffirmed his pledge to put America’s money where its mouth is, committing $1 billion to Egyptian debt forgiveness in addition to $1 billion of loans to finance infrastructure and jobs. Yet, the most arresting part was the section on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In calling for a two-state solution in which borders are based on “the 1967 line with mutually agreed swaps”, Obama has irked Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Given 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, outside the theoretical borders, and also that his government has provocatively expanded activity on settlements, Netanyahu unsurprisingly called this idea “indefensible”.
Dated-21/05/2011
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