Thousands of people, many wearing only underwear, rioted across northern India yesterday over power cuts that have left millions without electricity or water, highlighting the yawning gap between the country’s superpower aspirations and realities on the ground.

The violence underlined growing public frustration at the Government’s failure to improve the basic infrastructure, especially electricity and water supplies, despite an unprecedented economic boom.

The Government has pledged to provide “power for all” by 2012, but analysts say that it will struggle to keep up with demand as the middle class sates its appetite for electronic goods and larger homes.

While India’s economy has grown at an average of 8 per cent for the past four years, enriching a consumer class of 50-60 million people, half of the billion-plus population are not even connected to the electricity network. Those who are rely on voltage stabilisers, inverters (large batteries) and diesel-powered generators. The power minister in Uttar Pradesh predicted that the energy crisis would last for at least two more years.

Yesterday riots spread across the country’s most populous state, raising fears of repeated protests throughout India’s long, sweltering summer, as 24-hour blackouts deprived thousands of air-conditioning, fans and even drinking water in temperatures above 40C (104F).

Police fired teargas to disperse crowds who had blocked roads and railway lines, attacked police vehicles, set fire to an electricity transformer and attacked electricity workers. More than 250 people were arrested.

India’s power plants can produce 132,000 megawatt hours of electricity – less than half the output of the national grid in Britain. The Power Ministry says that demand is at least 14 per cent higher than that – and growing faster than output.

Uttar Pradesh is one of the worst-affected states. It generates 2,600 megawatt hours and imports a further 3,700, but still has a shortfall of about 1,800 during peak hours. Local officials said that the state had been unable to cope with a surge in demand, especially from air-conditioners, as temperatures soared this week. As a result, most cities had been getting only 12 hours of electricity a day.

The city of Gorakhpur, with a population of about four million, had no power for more than 24 hours, local officials said.

“We are fed up,” Ajit Singh, the owner and manager of a travel agency in the city, told The Times. “We pay our taxes but still the power is not coming. We cannot live like this, especially in such heat.”

Protesters in Gorakhpur stormed an office of the electricity board, taking several workers hostage and beating others. They also set fire to a nearby electricity transformer.

In Kanpur, the state’s largest city, hundreds of protesters marched to the home of the Kanpur Electric Supply Corporation’s managing director to complain about daily power cuts of 15 to 18 hours, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

At the stroke of midnight on Thursday they began beating drums, chanting hymns and singing parodies of Hindi movie songs,. “How can the electricity board officials sleep when the residents are sweating out in the sweltering heat,” the news agency quoted Irfan Solanki, a Samajwadi Party legislator who led the mob, as saying. “We have decided that neither will we sleep nor allow power corporation officials to sleep.”

Ram Veer Upadhaya, the state Power Minister, said that he expected the power crisis to continue for at least two years. “There is a big gap between the demand and supply. Our power stations do not generate required electricity,” he said.

He promised last month that the state would complete several power plants in the next five years to boost its generation capacity to 10,000MW – enough to provide 24-hour electricity for all.

Uttar Pradesh’s Paricha Thermal Power Project is scheduled to start generating in July next year and the Harduaganj Thermal Power Project three months later. Delays are almost certain and, for the moment, the power shortfall is so great that the state has been overdrawing from the national grid, causing power cuts in several neighbouring states.

Last month the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission threatened for the first time to cut power supplies to Uttar Pradesh for nonpayment of dues for overdrawing from the grid.

Growing pains

— From 1980 to 2002 India’s economy grew at 6 per cent a year, and then at 7.5 per cent from 2002 to 2006. Despite being one of the world's best-performing economies, it has lagged behind China, which averaged 9.2 per cent growth between 2002 and 2006

— In the past two decades, India's middle class has quadrupled to roughly 60 million people; 1 per cent of the country's poor have risen out of poverty every year

— Over the same period, China lifted 300 million people out of poverty and increased its workforce by 120 million

— India has more than 100,000 dollar millionaires, and is creating new ones at a rate rivalled only be Russia. China has 350,000 millionaires

— If current trends continue, India could overtake Britain as the world's fifth largest economy within a decade. It could then overtake the US, and be second to China by the middle of this century

Sources: IMF, United Nations; Times archives, CIA

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