In the Hollywood film Ghostbusters, a group of men start a company to catch ghosts. Watching the movie as an impressionable teenager, I was taken by the movie’s central message: the trick to catching ghosts is not to feel haunted in the first place.
As our daily forage for cooking gas and petrol becomes increasingly longer, it is clear that we are haunted by the ghosts of India. The spectre of the Indian ghost now clouds all our conversations.
The search for energy independence has once again fired the public imagination. But when you are haunted, it is easy to mistake self-sufficiency for energy independence. Sending our women folk out every morning with a sickle and a basket to gather firewood, as two-thirds of Nepal currently do, is not energy independence.
Contemporary energy independence for Nepal requires the exact opposite of self-sufficiency: deeper integration with energy markets in India and the world. India’s energy market has evolved considerably over the last few decades, but our understanding of it is still stuck in the oil crisis of the 1970s. To fathom energy independence, we need to first recalibrate our understanding to how India is dealing with its energy policy.
The hegemony of India’s central government over its energy market is eroding. First, state governments are becoming more assertive in the development and management of energy. Much of this is in part because Indian energy policy over the last two decades has seceded more authority to the states. Performance across the states isn’t uniform. Our immediate neighbouring states, unfortunately, are some of the worst performers.
Second, the private sector has a more commanding presence within India’s energy market. The domestic private sector has swept in quickly to capture the space offered by liberalisation. India’s most valued companies all have strong interest in energy, and some deal only with energy.
Even within state-owned companies, the government’s direct control is eroding. New Delhi is under pressure from the stock exchange regulator to divest a bigger share of its companies to keep them publicly listed. In part, it is also because the markets have themselves become more dynamic, forcing government-owned companies to change. To adapt, they are fighting back by using them as a public policy tool. Last year, for example, New Delhi had to resort to a presidential directive to get Coal India Limited (CIL) to behave in a certain way because its board declined to tow the government line. The government owns 90 per cent of the shares in the company.