In summer of discontent, Mumbai faces state ire

Over the last 15 days—as the crippled state’s power shortfall edges over the 4,000 mega watt (MW) mark—unprecedented rolling blackouts in small towns have got police out on the streets, swinging lathis, even opening fire on mobs refusing to accept cuts while Mumbai stays an island of light.

The disconnect is stark between the aspirations of a city that wants to position itself as Asia’s financial hub and the aspirations of small towns that want to run water pumps for crops, enjoy the fruits of prosperity—and ensure children can prepare for forthcoming school and college admissions.

In booming Mumbai, where 1,000 highrises have been cleared for construction and foreign institutional investors pumped in $ 9.78 billion (Rs 44,000 crore) in 2004-05, the darkened billboards—switched off from May 1—are bad auguries for the Shanghai dream.

‘‘Billboards add to the charm of the city, light up corners that are dark and are part of Mumbai’s culture,’’ says Prasoon Joshi, regional creative director, South Asia and South East Asia, McCann Erickson. ‘‘But if the government is doing this, they must have a good reason.’’

That reason, insisted Energy Minister Dilip-Walse Patil, is something people don’t seem to understand. ‘‘People should be happy,’’ he says, contending that blackouts had fallen to nine hours from 12.

But outside Mumbai, no one’s buying that with power cuts reaching 15 hours. Patil, say sources close to him, just spent half a day last week fielding calls on his cell phone from readers of a Nagpur newspaper, finally switching it off by noon when they got abusive.

Describing how Nagpur in Vidarbha was reeling under four hours of load-shedding even though 44 per cent of the state’s power is generated locally, the paper printed his number—alongwith those of Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and his deputy R R Patil—and urged readers to protest the mollycoddling of Mumbai.

The power crisis is now becoming a big opportunity for the Opposition, which is inciting protestors in Vidarbha and elsewhere. BJP MLA Devendra Phadnavis even threatened to cut a feeder line carrying power south.

Across the state, people are now reacting instantly to any sign that Mumbai’s island of lights—its power systems are computer-configured to draw power from other parts of the state grid if one line fails—is being protected.

After spending five comatose years, ignoring warnings and focussing its energies on a high-voltage morality drive as the power crisis snowballed, the government now fights daily fires as it struggles to keep Mumbai believing in Shanghai and the small towns from violence.

On March 25, the state announced that Mumbai’s suburbs of Bhandup, Mulund and Navi Mumbai would be the first to face blackouts, of two hours.

That decision was rolled back the next day as Mumbai’s vocal residents and local industrialists demanded to know how this could be done in a global-dreaming city, especially when they paid all their bills.

But rescinding the power cut to Mumbai meant increasing blackouts in nearby areas to 14 hours. On March 26, roadblocks on the Mumbai-Pune highway, 100 km south of Mumbai degenerated into stone-throwing that led to police firing in the air.

Power cuts have reached suburbs like Thane and Vasai, and the local power companies are encouraging power saving and penalising profligacy.

And out in the hinterland, the violence last week only spiralled: a lathicharge after protestors forced MSEB staffers to wear garlands of slippers in Ahmednagar; MSEB engineers running for cover after their faces were blackened in the same district; a substation attacked in Kolhapur; board offices locked down in the eastern districts of Bhandara and Chandrapur…

And the summer is just starting.

(With Lalitha Suhasini in Mumbai and Vivek Deshpande in Nagpur)