 Hello and let's talk about the Energy Amendment Bill 2020. India is going through a pandemic but the centre seems to have introduced a bill that will drastically overhaul the power and energy sector. And the states as well as the employees are not happy. This pandemic has shown, among other things, that public services are essential for the country to run smoothly. But here we have a proposal that will actually strengthen the private sector. This proposal will also actually strengthen the centre whereas the states suffer. To talk more about this, we talk to energy expert Tejal Kanitkar. Here is what she had to say. Tejal, thank you so much for joining us. Now this is the fourth version of this electricity amendment bill that has been introduced by the Modi government. And this is being introduced at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is on. There are a lot of issues being faced by the country. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that state services and public services are really essential as far as the people are concerned. But this bill seems to be moving in a completely different direction. So could you tell us about the kind of structural changes that this bill seeks to break or amendment seeks to break? You're absolutely right. One is it's an absolutely bad time for them to be pushing this bill. Even otherwise, the bill is pretty bad. But this, in particularly because states have been fighting the COVID-19 fight, there is no time for people to be able to respond to this. Thankfully, they have now extended the deadline for when you could respond to the bill. But there are four major things about the bill that I think are important. And this is sort of carrying forward from the Electricity Act 2003 itself, which first introduced major changes in the way in which we thought about the electricity sector. Since then, and since the 19 structural changes that were implemented in the sector since 1991, there has been a continuous encroachment of the center on what is a subject on the concurrent list. You can see this in pushing off renewable energy targets from the center on to the states and many other things. But one of the things that this new bill I think does is like never before, it increases central control of the central government in the electricity sector where states simply have to bear the burden and be onlookers. They have very little wiggle room in terms of making policy and even regulating. They push even more aggressively the model of privatization, which despite many, many attempts for the last 30 years since the reforms were introduced in the sector have failed. There is a refusal to learn from history on this count. There is a much more aggressive move to eliminate cross subsidies and replace them with this direct benefit transfer of subsidies from the state governments directly to the beneficiaries, not even to the utilities in question. How the states which are already dealing with extremely empty coffers are going to manage this is another story. And there is an even bigger push for renewable energy again in all of this while centralizing the policy making on renewable energy. This, of course, we know the prime minister, he wants to make this his sort of legacy, the renewable energy target. So there's a push for this and it is not fairly very clear why at this point on because all indications are that even without COVID-19, we were in pretty bad shape in terms of where our electricity demand was heading. We were much lower than what we had anticipated. With COVID-19, we have already back down a lot of our generation, quite considerably, thermal more than 25%. And so we are in a situation of power surplus. Why push for more renewable energy at this point of time is a serious question. Right. So one of the key aspects you mentioned is the privatization element of this. So how would you explain a bit more how this amendment actually takes it forward in terms of how the distribution and is going to take place? So the act itself in 2003 said that we should privatize especially two segments. One is the generation segment of the power sector and the other is a distribution segment. Broadly, the sector is divided into three segments. It's power generation, transmission and distribution. Transmission is like the high voltage transmission of electricity from the generation stations to the distribution companies. Distribution is what takes it from the high voltage transformers to end users. So the first and the last segment were sought to be privatized. What has happened in the last 30 years is that generation, they have been fairly successful in privatizing. We've had a lot of investments in generation and that's part of the problems that ails the sector currently and we'll talk about this a little bit more. The distribution segment has not been, they have not been successful in privatizing it. What they have tried to do, another version of this bill came up in 2018, where they had argued for what is known as carriage and content separation. This was directly lifted, even the terminology was lifted from the World Bank report of 2014, where they say okay what happens is that the state government or the state distribution utility is in charge of the wires and the infrastructure of supply and the actual supply of electricity will be done by private distributors. This of course was opposed by many people. Now what they say is the same thing in a different language. They say that you will, what should be done is introduction of distribution sub-licenses or franchises. The difference between sub-licency and franchisee whether it is a difference in scale or something like that is not clear from the bill at all. But what these sub-licenses will do is they won't require a new license. All they would require is the current distribution utility will hand out a portion of their region to these sub-licenses and in this region, the sub-licency will then buy power from somebody and sell it to the end users. This according to them will reduce the, is supposed to have two benefits. One is it will reduce the cost of power procurement. The other is it will reduce the cost of operation of the grid by reducing the TND losses. This has been tried before and has failed quite miserably in both cases even when there has been cherry picking, meaning only the urban clusters, urban agglomerations have been sought to be privatized. Nobody is interested in no private distribution licensee is interested in supplying power to rural areas because these are not profit-making consumers. They are not consumers that can pay the full cost of electricity. So they are interested in urban areas and even in these urban areas, this has not been, even in a place like Mumbai for example, where electricity distribution is privatized. Earlier reliance now Adani in the suburban part except for some part of South Mumbai, the rest of it is privatized. There have been protests, there have been continuous tariff hikes and cost to consumers has not been able to reduce. In Delhi, the only way in which this has been possible where we also have privatized supply is where the distribution by creating what are known as regulatory assets. So because there has been an increase in prices that has been allowed, but because you couldn't transfer those prices to the consumers, you create an asset which can then be paid for at some point of time later. One last thing is that Orissa is the only place where there was a non-urban consumers as well that were included. There were three attempts at privatization for the last 25 years and they have failed, the distribution sector is back with the government now in worse shape than when it was handed over to the private distribution company. And these are privatization of TISCOM models. There were franchisee models in Bhivandi, Amdabad, Agra, etc. Even here the franchisees have been unable to break even, even though they have stuck to only urban agglomeration. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you for having me. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching NewsClick. For our next segment, we bring you a bit of a conversation between NewsClick's Prabir Purka Eshta and P. Sainath, the founder of the People's Archive of rural India. They discuss the way the Indian media is functioning, how it is sunk to its lowest during the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the threats and assaults against those journalists who dare to go against the government and its official version. Take a look. How would you look at the whole issue of what is the reporting that media can do under various additional constraints which have been put under COVID-19 now, Epidemic Act, fake news, all these things are now being used against the media in different ways? Well, one is that some of those constraints have been self-imposed. At a time when you really need to be telling the public what's going on, you've laid off hundreds of excellent journalists, reporters who are pretty good and partly because they are independent-minded. They're the ones who get the shaft when something like this happens. So we don't know how many journalists have been laid off, but we know it's in hundreds. This, by the way, has precedence. You've done it after 2008, the Wall Street collapse. You've done it as media marches towards its digital Shangri-La. And you've done it in the best of years at high profits. When the COVID thing came along, it gave them an excuse to say, look, we are helpless. We have to throw these guys to the sharks. That's it. Yes, some of them have done so because of being seriously in financial trouble. But many of those layoffs were planned anyway and were being routinely conducted. The second thing is about government. See, you know, even on corporate mainstream media, you've had the acceptance of this term and people keep using it. Crony capitalism. My thing is that we all know what capitalism is, I assume. Have you ever wondered who's the crony? We are, the media. They're the cronies. Please know that in crony capitalism, the cronies are the media. The most important thing about Indian billionaires, the 121 of them listed a year ago and maybe now 106 or something, is that they are what some progressive economists call red thick billionaires, frontier incomes. They capture huge public resources as a favor from government, like I get the oil and natural gas, the fields, etc. Then I subcontract to thousands of people and do little myself, right? And I just keep the most core profitable business a part of it myself and outsource everything else. It also helps when you come to layoffs and everything else that we don't know who these people are. It's not our job. They're not our employees. Now, the thing with this approach is that it makes your billionaire class, which is a very important, very important segment of Indian, of the Indian ruling elite. Do not underestimate them in 2018-19, their individual, their cumulative wealth of those 121 individuals was equivalent to 22% of your gross domestic product, giving an entirely different emphasis to the word gross. Because of their rent-thick wealth, because of their dependence on public resources, they are never, ever going to seriously conflict with government. It's their government. Second, who owns these enterprises? They're all gigantic corporations. Now, the richest man in the country is the biggest media owner, Mukesh Bhai, is the biggest media owner. So I'm saying the relationship between government and media has to be understood in this sense. I also put it in another sense because of the present government. I've been saying for several years, your country is ruled by an alliance. It's ruled by an alliance of socio-religious fundamentalists and economic market fundamentalists. And this happy marriage, I mean, the bed they cohabit is called the corporate media. And there are many people who are part of all three, all these three forces. There are, I mean, our prime minister and our home minister are very much part of both camps, socio-religious fundamentalists and economic market fundamentalists. Now you have economic market fundamentalists who are also the very clever, clever young guys who came out of Harvard and Wharton, etc. We know who are still saying the same things that, you know, they've been taught around to tell us what went wrong when they have never got it right in their lives. In 2017, your chief economic advisor and another important man of Neethi Aayog, Vivek Debroy and Mr. Arvind Subramaniam went head-to-head with Thomas Piketty on television in Nidhi Rastancho and declared inequality is not an issue. Those words, go and look at the clip. And flaunting wealth is not an issue. Now the kind of corporate owners of the media are people who have benefited enormously from that growing inequality. So there are many people in both camps and the media have really been the cheerleaders, the canvas for this. Let's come to COVID and let's look at how there are five things that stand out in how the media has functioned on this. The first is the incredible surprise, you know, the injured innocent surprise of the existence of a species called migrant labor. They were shell shocked by that on March 25th, hours after he made that, the prime minister made the announcement, you know, old gentleman ex-IS officer, Deva Sahayam, said it so nicely. He said, even a small infantry brigade asked to go into a major action is given more than four hours notice. A nation of 1.3 billion was given a four hour notice to shut down their lives. So we, and I am arguing that though it may not be in their interest, that's debatable, the action of migrant laborers was entirely rational. You know, Saira, I would interrupt you at one point because this brings up something you have been talking about for a long time, that media does not cover certain things because they're not consumers, they do not consume for the advertisers and therefore there are no interests to the media owners or the media itself. So migrant workers, agriculture, poorer sections do not figure in the pages because they know they are not people who will consume and bring in advertisements. Praveen, in 2006-07, when I was in the Hindu and a Chennai-based newspaper was covering Vidarbha more than any newspaper in Maharashtra. Young journalists in the times dying to cover it, wanting to go there, pleaded with their management and asked them, look, this is a Chennai-based newspaper. The Marathi newspapers are reproducing them. We should be covering this. They got a memo which told them, dying farmers in Vidarbha do not buy the times of Vidya, the elites of Sobo, South Bombay do. Okay, this is what they were told by them management. Look, Praveen, when you don't have a single correspondent full-time to cover labor of all kinds, farm labor, industrial labor, when you don't have a single correspondent and crafts persons, when you don't have a single correspondent to cover farming full-time from the perspective of the farmer, you are saying 75% of the population do not make news. Why the hell should I have someone to cover them? And dying farmers don't give me revenue. If I make money out of covering you, I cover you. I make money out of covering volume, I cover volume. It's as simple and rational as that. The other part of the media which I wanted you to talk about, explain to us that all these acts which are now in play from the Epidemic Act to the Disaster Management Act, they also have clauses, don't spread panic and therefore that becomes a provision under which criminal action can be taken, FIRs can be filed. Now we see a whole bunch of FIRs and criminal action against a certain set of people and the well-known ones, those who are critical of the government or those who are actually also targets of communal propaganda, which a certain section of the Sangh Parivar indulges in all of this time. We also see selective use of this and also see no use of this against obvious hate speech and hate propaganda being unleashed by what you call the Hindu fundamentalist right or I will call really the Hindu sectarian right at the moment. I think there isn't any doubt, I mean there's no doubt in my mind that between what we'd like to see come out of the lessons of the pandemic and what is going to happen, I think there is going to be a huge rise in authoritarian power and its use, the consolidation. Praveen it's much bigger than just a couple of laws, you are looking at the dismantling of the parliamentary democratic system. Let me tell you this, no elections matter, no governments matter, no opposition matters, the cabinet doesn't matter, one gentleman addresses the nation and tells it what to do. You are actually seeing governance by one person who never holds a press, open press conference in his entire six years of has never held a press conference, open press conference where people can ask him questions. In the US you have government officials fearing that every morning press conference of Trump wondering how he's going to screw them up by the next absurdity he states. He can't stay away from talking to the media and there are questions asked of him. Here no, this is the one democracy in the world where the leader does not feel obliged to be accountable, asked questions by the media nothing.