Wednesday, May 1, 2013

“There is no problem in power generation in India!”

Dipak Dasgupta, Principal Economic Adviser - Ministry of Finance, in an interview with Sray Agarwal and Ganesh K Roy, on reforms for infrastructure and transport

How do you feel about the Indian Economy right now?
Dipak Dasgupta (DD): There is no doubt that the Indian economy has slowed down and the reason for this is a function of strategy failure and that the investors have lost their confidence. The last year scenario also has not been favorable; but this is not a new thing rather it’s the investment cycle which remains in every developing economy all around the world. That [investment cycle] is what drives the course of any economy. At the same time, the problems in Europe and US have hampered the growth of many countries and we are not alone. China too is going through this phase. The last time we had that cycle was in the year 2008. Export markets are growing very badly. We also need a logistics revolution so that growth can been accelerated. Despite having poor infrastructure, we have been able to grow at such a high rate; but now we need a major infrastructure revolution so that we can again reach to the erstwhile levels. Ours is a large landlocked country, which is much like a continent; so we need to connect all the corridors to achieve better growth. But we don’t have that kind of a system right now in our country. We have a young population which will help us to grow in the long run. We need more public private partnerships in India to make things better. There is a huge skills gap between public and private firms – which makes it imperative for the PPP model to flourish in India. We are in a marathon race and not in a 100 metres race; so we need long term plans which will enhance our economy. 

Power failures, time overruns, cost overruns, are the indicators of structural flaws in the economy. How do you think India can overcome these hurdles?
DD: Power generation is growing at 8.8 % in India. In fact, contrary to the general perception, there are huge power plants coming up in India; this shows the level of development that we are going through. Yes, here we have a system where some states are producing huge amount of power and some are not and the demand is also not equal in each state. There is no problem at the production end; rather, we have a problem at the distribution end and in the channels. We have built a state of the art facility in the field of power generation so there is no problem at the generation part.

But the slowdown did not happen overnight. Do you think the government’s policy paralysis added on to this situation?
DD: We need to do things every day because doing things once in a year won’t do well for any economy. We need to bring in reforms every now and then so that the growth story is kept on going. In the government sector, incentives are less and performance parameter are also not standardized. Politicians respond to what the electorate wants. How to make the public sector work better is the challenge. A strong leadership is the need of the hour.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
 
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles
 
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,