ENERGY AND POWER 61
enormous losses to electricity boards. This situation must change, for which just nationalising the coal industry is not enough; adequate technological inputs have also to be provided which is currently not the case.
Regarding hydro-power also, Rao continued, wrong policies have pushed the nation to a sad position. All developed countries and also China have more or less exhausted their hydel sources. Rao drew attention to the comment of the Working Group on Energy (1979) that "the hydel potential available for development would represent an annual bonus of nearly 250 million tonnes of coal. Being a renewable source, the hydel energy that is not utilised any year is lost forever, whereas the coal that is not burnt is available for the next generation", India has continued to neglect thi-5 most important renewable energy source. Lately, the ecology scare has truncated even the modest progammes.
Even the limited power development lacks the concept of technological self-reliance. India has managed to have 20 unit sizes (25MW, 25, 5, 30, 32, 50, 60, 62.5, 63. 5, 75, 100, 110, 120, 140, 150, two variants of 200, 210, 500 and so on!) imported from 18 countries under aid schemes from 23 countries! This has caused excessive accumulation of spares and high inventories. In the absence of standardisation, which is the international practice, electricity boards continue to reel under the burden of excessive maintenance and breakdown delays. In the USSR the practice is to take a ratio of 50:1 between the unit system capacity and unit capacity. From this consideration India does not have a single grid to take a 500MW unit What will then happen with the functioning of the proposed super thermal stations (for which one day's stoppage means a loss of Rs 60 lakhs, assuming the rate at 0.50 paise per unit) is anybody's guess.
In conclusion Rao explained with technical data that all talk of alternative energy sources, e g, solar, wind, etc, &erve only to divert the attention of the people from the^ main issues underlying the nation's current predicament.
K Vijayachandran, formerly a senior executive of BHEL and one of the consistent opponents of the notorious BHEL-Siemens 'umbrella5 collaboration, presented a historical overview of power development in India. Highlighting the fact th it the per capita consumption of electricity in India is only one-sixtieth of that of the US, one-thirtieth of that of the USSR and one-fourth of that of China, Vijayachandran presented data to show how consistently India ha-s been performing even below its modest target; the slippage for the Fifth Plan was as high as 50 per cent. He underlined the paradoxical situation where even though industry increased its energy consumption several fold, its contribution to national income has been rather small. This fact however is related to an even larger anomaly: in an economy where the private sector claims the lion's share (80 per cent) of the national income, the entire burden of providing cheap power is borne by the