How is the power situation in your state?

I laugh when I hear terms like superpower and developed in context of India. It does not even have the most basic things in place to be called a properly functional state.

Good point indeed.
Its ultimately a matter of political economy. My brother in law said that line losses are immense. They actually have to use steel line instead of copper in areas to prevent theft of the lines itself! We have all seen power thefts in urban areas. In the countryside its winked at as part of a vote bank. There its massive theft on top of much greater line losses. Efforts to improve the system require finances which are perpetually hostage to state electricity boards that practice the same chicanery as individuals. Its not a technical issue as much as political culture. That is the rub and ultimately a major impediment to development..

...Developing nation. It's the ing that people overlook.


The power situation when we got home about 10.00pm last night was that our house was blacked out and the inverter (battery backup for light and fans) was flashing its fault light.

Thinking that some sort of meltdown inside it must be responsible, I isolated it --- and was literally shocked by current on what should have been the line taking its current to the house. Disconnected, it should be dead. Thinking next step, I took the cover off the distribution board (keen amateur electrician ) to take all of its wiring out of the question. Whilst poking around, I found live current on the neutral bar. Oh dear. I thought I had it isolated to one phase (three-phase supply) so turned that off.

Faults seemed to come and go. At one point I had lights and fans going. Very fast fans and very bright lights. I stuck the meter probes in a socket and got 350 volts . Multiple short circuits, phase to phase and phase to neutral? Hmmm... probably the whole damned house needs rewiring now, and the three-phase supply cable is suspect. By 4.00am I isolated everything at the supply board, and went to bed, hot, tired, hungry, fed up. Mrs N woke up and we decided to call in an EB engineer we know in the morning.

He came at 9.00am (Mrs N's job to beg on the phone!). With some translation by Mrs N, I told him our woeful symptoms. He took it all in, poked with his testing screwdriver, connected a bulb across phases (sophisticated test kit!) and announced that he suspected the problem was at the pole connection. He called a colleague, who climbed ... and within half an hour we had sane, sensible, safe electricity. Light! Fans! Air Conditioning!

And the house doesn't need rewiring

Oh, and the inverter only took a quick call to support, and pushing a sequence of buttons to recover

Our local cable is aluminium. And, as for theft, theft of copper is one of the main things that interrupts service on UK railways. Usually signalling circuits, but people are even known to risk sawing through heavy duty cables carrying heavy duty current on electrified routes.

.

Don't ever remember having seen anything other than Aluminium at all being used on all the Poles locally. Probably even the underground cables are now Aluminium.

It soon will be Ganesh Puja. Every Street corner Puja will be stealing power from the Poles on the Street.

one would think.

yet, in the articles I read on that subject, apparently many commenters to those articles are myopic about reality and get insulted when one questions that reality. Jai Hind and all that....

Developed, as in will be developed in so and so years

Hyped up and misplaced notion about patriotism...we have this problem of being patriotic at totally wrong places, and look the other way where it is actually required.

The Indian Ministery for renewable energies (MNRE) has published more details of a support program for off-grid solar power plants as part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM). In addition to the existing 30% support for off grid solar plants private and government banks will sponsor 40% of the costs for solar lamps, house lights and solar panels up to 210 W.

Got this message from www.solarserver.de (German), the mentioned source is MNRE.