FT, excerpt:
Sitting in his garden in New Delhi last Wednesday, Sushil Kumar Shinde, India’s outgoing power minister, looked relaxed in an open-necked white shirt, serenely detached from the chaos that had over-run his country in the previous 48 hours. In the aftermath of a series of rolling blackouts that left more than 600m people without electricity and heaped further doubt on his nation’s faltering image as an aspirant economic superpower, Mr Shinde calmly deflected criticism. “India is an expert in this sector,” he told a television interviewer, adding: “This is technological failure, it has nothing to do with the political system.” When asked how he rated his own six-year tenure, he replied with just one word: “Excellent.”
It is an assessment few in India are likely to accept.
In fact, the rickety power grid represents only part of a deeper crisis brewing in this country of 1.2bn. Indian business leaders fear the troubles of the moribund energy sector could fatally undermine some of the nation’s banks, unless the government takes decisive action. |
