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Politics, Policy and all things Digital about India

April 24, 2013 • 12:42 pm 1

Karnataka Polls 2013 – Why fixing the Last Mile of Governance is so important ?

Happened to receive this Facebook update from the MD of Bescom explaining why Bangalore is suffering so many outages. The MD of Bescom can be found on Facebook here and Bescom also has a Facebook page updating on outages.

But what is so illuminating about this Letter is how deeply broken the Last Mile of Service Delivery is even in the most Technologically Savvy of Cities in India and what is worse there is no Single Point of Local Accountability to fix it. It is also illuminating of the thoughtless manner in which the Electricity Regulation has happened by breaking up erstwhile PSU Monopoly only to be replaced by more PSU Monopolies.

FB Note by Bescom MD on Frequent Outages in South Bangalore

Power outage in south Bangalore this evening, due to technical fault at Somanahalli power receiving station, for the nth time! I don’t know what to say. While i sincerely regret the inconvenience caused to the citizens, i also want to tell them why this happens and what can be done to improve the situation.

Do you know that, Bangalore is the ONLY metro in India, where the power supply for the city in the hands of three agencies, in series, one after another? It means, the electricity flows thru 3 different companies before reaching your home. If any one of them fails, you don’t get the supply!

BESCOM is a distribution company. It means that, BESCOM receives power from another entity, and sells it in retail thru its vast network of distribution lines. BESCOM receives the electricity from the numerous sub-stations in the city, owned and maintained by another agency called as KPTCL (Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation Ltd). KPTCL evacuates the power from the yard of the generators like RTPS (Raichur Thermal Power Station), transmits the electricity over the high-tension wires for 100s of KMs, till the electricity reaches the sub-stations all over.

From the substation, BESCOM picks up the electricity thru its 11KV cables, runs it into the small transformers you see on every street corner, reduce the voltage to 440 volts, and sends it to your home.

As you can see it, there are three agencies; the generator, the transmitter and the distributor. Of these three, the most important is the transmitter, as its failure will mean no electricity at all. If one generator like RTPS fails, we can take electricity from other source. But, if the KPTCL lines fails?!

This is what exactly happens many a times! There is not much of problem in transmitting the electricity from the RTPS to the outskirts of the city. But, the problem starts in the huge receiving stations. There are 3 such receiving stations for our Bangalore. One in North, peenya; one is East, Hoodi; one in South; Somanahalli.

All these three are, ahem, in bad shape. They are overloaded, and increase in the consumption makes them trip. Their capacity is not augmented at the pace the city grew. One reason could be that, nobody wants to take a risk of creating more capacity. One transformer in such station costs 5 crores! What if one buys a transformer and the growth is not commensurate? There will be audit objection on the officer who took that risk. So, transformers are bought NOT anticipating the demand, but after the demand outstriped the capacity! The interregnum is the period of load restrictions (shedding). Thus, we have load-restrictions (brownouts) inspite of having sufficient power at hand.

Same is the case with the cables (Underground) laid by KPTCL across the city. While the cables were laid 20 years back, such a sharp growth was not expected. Now, due to very high growth, we have to lay additional cables. It’s not easy! If BBMP gives road cutting permission, Traffic police will not!:) If both give, somebody else will not! Can you believe that the Bangalore university is not giving KPTCL permission to lay the cable thru its campus, for last 15 months?! Thus, we have reasons and reasons and reasons!

Anyway, the point is, should there be one single agency (generation, transmission and distribution) which should be accountable for power supply to the city like Bangalore? Will there be pressure on the agency to perform, as it will be directly accountable to the public? Will it innovate ways and means to surmount the problems? Can we discuss this important issue?

NB: Just now i got the information that the fault found in the Somanahalli station is rectified and supply is normalised to all areas of the city!

A

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Filed under: ABIDE Bangalore, Karnataka Polls 2013, Local Governance

February 23, 2013 • 6:40 am 0

The Intellectually Malnourished Debate on Gujarat’s Social Indicators

Originally published on Niti Central here. Updated below with Twitter debate on this blog post between Sadanand Dhume and many friends.

On July 26, 2012 a complaint was received by a court in New York. The plaintiff in that law suit was our very own New Delhi Television Ltd, or NDTV. The case was filed against, among others, most notably Nielsen Holdings and Nielsen Company. To quote the core complaint against Nielsen, Kantar and their India-based joint venture Television Audience Measurement (TAM), the case was to do with “losses” apparently suffered by NDTV on account of alleged “rampant corruption” in the Television Audience Measurement business.

To the puzzled reader wondering what this squabble between a television channel and a television viewership survey agency has to do with the debate at hand over social indicators in Gujarat and the leftist propaganda in oped columns, let me call upon your patience and direct your attention to what specifically was NDTV’s problem with the Nielsen and Kantar joint venture, TAM.

The first concern NDTV had with TAM was the survey sample size. It wanted it to be increased from 8,000 to 30,000. The lack of adequate sample size is a recurrent theme in NDTV’s complaint. The complaints get serious with added element of corruption in the data collection area. The complaint quotes unnamed senior officials of Nielsen and Kantar admitting that television audience surveys in India were generating inaccurate data due to rampant corruption.  A more insightful view emerges from the findings of a committee that looked into the whole area of television audience survey in India. Specifically the committee found “sample sizes to be inadequate” and “lack of reliability” in data collection methods from sample homes.

The limitation of ‘sample sizes’ in conducting surveys in a demographically heterogeneous population is not limited to the world of Television Audience Measurement alone.  As we have seen in India, in election after election exit polls and pre-poll surveys falter pitifully from the final outcomes in States with multi-polar contests and complex demographics.

Which leads us to the question: If surveying something as technologically straightforward as Television Audience Measurement can be so faulty and corrupt in a country like India, how much faith can we put into surveying something as sociologically complex as human development indicators?

I hope the patient reader now appreciates the detour from the intellectually malnourished debate on social indicators of Gujarat to the murky world of television ratings to question the very credibility and pseudo-science behind how social indicators are sampled and projected.

There are sound scientific reasons to debunk the entire approach by these leftist commentators who have been abusing lagging social indicators to make politically convenient arguments.

Take the case of ‘Sample Registration System’ or SRS that is used to measure infant mortality among other social indices. It is not a population wide measurement (Census like). Instead, it relies on about 7,000 sample units. The data is not collected by professionals and not through technology enabled automation but manually by part-timers. There is usually a six-month lag for independent audits. The sample itself is based on a 10-year Census during which demographics may have altered significantly. As an example the current sample is still based on the 2001 Census data.

Take the case of another index that was bandied about by activists of all sorts in Oped columns during 2011 and 2012 – the so called ‘Indian State Hunger Index’. It was based on 2004-2005 sample data and a statistical model developed in the West with no independent validation or relevance for Indian conditions. Even the UNDP HDI index is a lagging indicator at best.

If samples and statistical models were found to be faulty and unreliable for television viewing habits and electoral preferences, why pray should we deem them to be anymore scientifically accurate for measuring social indicators?

Lastly, let me draw attention to a recent story in The Times of India on how elite pockets of Mumbai were found to have a skewed sex ratio. The story was interesting not so much for its political import but for the granularity of the data cited, getting down to specific pockets within the city of Mumbai. This kind of granularity is far more actionable and useful as it points out specific areas where potentially welfare interventions by local Government (municipal or panchayat) could make a real difference.

Contrast this with pointless State-level aggregated social indices on infant mortality or sex ratio.

They neither pinpoint the dark zones nor the bright spots. They can’t tell you if Surat is better performing or if a certain pocket of Patna has a problem. These leftist sociological constructs are at best lagging indicators that end up making the case for Centrally-sponsored schemes and statist top-down welfare models. While these social indices help in academic analyses while keeping the Delhi-based extended ecosystem of NGOs and activists gainfully employed, they are barely actionable.

The TOI story on sex ratio disparity across the city of Mumbai is a pointer to how we must fundamentally alter the debate on social performance, taking it away from the voodoo statistics and pseudo-science of the political Left.

Today the Nielsen method of panel-based media audience measurement is being challenged by upstarts with the help of big data analytics and population-wide Census-based methods of audience measurement. Recently the Obama re-election campaign employed similar population-wide behavioral analytics to micro-target voters to ensure his re-election. There is no reason why we in India must not look to technology to devise ingenious methods for near real time data collection and population-wide analytics of social performance.  This will not only help micro-target and localise welfare Interventions by local Governments (as opposed to centralised schemes) but it will also shift the focus away from agenda-driven politicking based on lagging indicators and towards a debate on actionable interventions that can make a difference here and now.

Let me end with relating an experiment the World Bank attempted in 2010 by opening up all of its data sets through open APIs for an ‘Apps for Development’ contest.  There is a lesson in this experiment to our Governments on how to win back the debate from the agenda-driven Left by embracing the idea of ‘Open Government’.

It is time real facts based on near real time data made these voodoo statisticians and pseudo-social scientists redundant, perhaps even irrelevant.

Associated Twitter debate:

 

Filed under: Left Liberalism, Local Governance, Narendra Modi, UPA-II Critical Appraisal

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