STAB a finger at the middle of a map of India and you will hit Nagpur. Some 20 miles (32 kilometres) north-west of the city is a sloping tunnel bored into the rock. Ride two miles down into the gloom, hanging from a wire, and after a torch-lit hike past underground streams and conveyor belts you arrive at a black wall. Sweating men are rigging it with tubes of explosives and wire detonators. Soon they will blast it apart, and down should tumble tonnes of India's most important commodity: coal.
In coal India has something as abundant as people. As more Indians enjoy the trappings of middle-class life and the country industrialists, demand for coal-fired electricity will continue to rise smartly, roughly in line with economic growth. India may not have much oil or gas to call its own but it has the world's fifth-largest coal reserves. And it has successfully raised a mountain of the other raw material needed to turn carbon into sparks: capital.
Some $130 billion has been ploughed into the power industry in the past five years. Of that, $60 billion or so has come from the private sector—probably the largest-ever private-sector investment India has seen.
Possessing coal and capital is no guarantee that India's energy boiler will work properly, however. It also involves multiple states, government ministries, regulators, mandarins, politicians, tycoons, environmentalists, villagers, activists, crooks and bandits. There are the usual gripes of an emerging economy: blackouts (during peak hours the system delivers 10% less electricity than customers want) and an inadequate grid that does not reach some 300m people (although it has improved a lot in recent years).
There is also a risk that India cannot deliver the long-term increase in electricity generation that its economy needs to fulfill its potential. On January 18th a group of influential businessmen gathered in Delhi to bend the prime minister's ear on this very matter.
The problem is partly one of design.
Coal is dug up by a state-monopolist that has failed to boost output significantly in recent years, unlike China (see chart 1), and so cannot keep up with demand.
Power is distributed to homes and firms by publicly owned grid companies that are often bankrupt, their tariffs kept too low by local politicians. Trapped in the middle are the firms that run power stations. In desperation they are importing pricier foreign coal, but the grid companies cannot afford the power it produces. With too little coal and wobbly customers,
the private firms that have built new power stations are in financial trouble. Another wave of private investment looks unlikely.
Yes it seems Indians have sustainable system in place to produce and sell power
plus I am pretty sure 60 $billion from private sectors isn't taking any profits
not to mention Indian government underwrote those investments at the cost of millions to tax payers, point is simple, go fix your own before telling us what to do, our experiment with private power (k-Electric) has been a complete success and we should continue on that path