| Electricity is available in only 15-20 per cent of the villages in Bihar. The region has electricity, but it gets power for around 15-20 minutes of the 24 hours. Alauli is supposedly on a motorable road from the district headquarters, Khagaria. It takes two hours to cover a distance of 18 km. |
| The villages are inordinately proud of their telephone lines, put in when Paswan was communications minister. The vote here is for Paswan not his brother. It matters little that there is no electricity, no hospital, and the villages dissolve in a blanket of darkness the moment dusk falls. |
| The providers of electricity have their own problems. A top state electricity board official explained that not just Alauli, all of Bihar is sitting on a powder keg of power-shortage that could engulf the state any time. |
| Bihar, especially, after its division, produces no power and has to buy electricity from the power-surplus Eastern Grid. The Muzaffarpur Thermal Power Station has been closed for more than a year now, because the power board discovered it cost more to keep the plant running than the power it produced. |
| The Barauni Thermal Power Station operates two or three days a week and a maximum of a week or 10 days a month. It operates at 15-20 per cent capacity. |
| The state buys power from the National Thermal Power Corporation's Kahalgaon, Tal-cher and Farakka units, the National Hydro Power Corporation's Rangsit and Sikkim units and from the Power Trading Corporation that supplies power from Bhutan's Chukha hydro power project. |
| Obviously, this is costly. These agencies also want their bills settled in cash. At the same time, the power board has to pay the wages and salaries of its predominantly non-technical staff. The state's power bill every month is Rs 95 crore. With salaries, this adds up to Rs 130 crore. |
| Tariffs, especially domestic tariffs, are graded on the basis of units consumed. But the domestic tariffs are absurdly low, the lowest in India. For a home that consumes 100 units or less, the tariff is Rs 1.80 paise a unit. |
| Industry and commercial establishments, on the other hand, pay as much as they do in states like Delhi and Punjab. The state collects revenue amounting to Rs 65 crore. The deficit, the state government pays out of various heads that officials would rather not talk about. Still, it accumulates a deficit of around Rs 25 crore a month. |
| They admit that not only do they have to revise their tariffs upwards (this was done last in 1993), but also that they will face an explosion of demand when more an more villages like Alauli are electrified as part of the rural electrification programme that is going on apace. |
| "We are going to face a shutdown if we do not pay the arrears that we owe to the central government agencies. But also, once villages are electrified, we will be under the tremendous pressure to provide power. I have no idea what we will do when that demand is created," said an official ruefully. |
| The state power board is trying out outsourcing - for maintenance, bill preparation and revenue -collection. But at peak demand, once the first phase of electrification is over, Bihar will require four to five times the amount of power it gets now - it buys between 800 Mw currently to satisfy a demand of 1,000 Mw. |
| Revision of rates is a political issue and officials are hoping that if the Rabri Devi government is re-elected, it will be able to summon up the political will to increase tariffs just after the elections. |
| "If not, over the next few years, we are going to face power riots," said an official. Then Paras might not find the going so easy in Alauli. |
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