It would have been unthinkable some years ago, but there is a glamour quotient becoming attached to power grids. These so-called dumb-wires, which carry electricity from the point where it is generated to the consumption point, are morphing into smart wires — and smart grids — which are well suited to managing energy in a green-sensitive world. One of the more prominent, and glamorous, supporters of smart grids is US President Barack Obama.
Shift the focus to India’s dumb-wires and you will see one transmission behemoth at the federal level — Powergrid Corporation of India. Rajendra Prasad Singh headed this Navratna company for close to 12 years and decided to share his tale in this 150-page book.
There is little glamour, unfortunately, in the book which is, as the title strap says, about “Managing power games and power lines”, and more of the former than the latter.
There is the usual litany of the tendering process — which most public sector companies suffer — the power that mischief-makers enjoy, the might of the contractors lobby and the never-ending vigilance enquires that follow. The way Singh talks about how he managed the various challenges and earned the respect of all the bureaucrats and politicians he worked with, this book could be considered a hagiography of Singh, by Singh.
He took officiating charge as chairman and managing director of Powergrid on November 1, 1996 and finally left office in May 30, 2008. “In these years, I worked with — survived would perhaps be a more appropriate word — four prime ministers, seven power ministers and six secretaries in the Ministry of Power,” he says. The book records his brush with a host of power sector protagonists, from R Kumaramangalam Birla to Rabri Devi to Nitish Kumar to Sushil Kumar Shinde, among others, with an aside on Sonia Gandhi thrown in.
Singh has tried to establish that our warped “system” does yield and give way when faced with a straight, competent, hardworking public servant, like himself. He also writes about how he managed to inculcate a Powergrid culture in the employees who were drawn from various other government companies and departments. It would have sounded much more convincing if it had come from a third party, rather than from Singh himself.
For instance, he writes about the excitement within the organisation when he was elected the first president of the Very Large Power Grid Operators — a grouping of operators from 12 counties, each with a power generation capacity of at least 60,000 Mw. “The CMD’s election was, in effect, the corporation’s election. This had an exhilarating impact. Similarly, when my alma mater, Banaras Hindu University, awarded me a doctorate of science (honoris causa), it was touching that several colleagues were genuinely happy and felt they shared the honour. The gulf between individual achievement and institutional pride had been bridged.” Not everyone would agree though that that was indeed the case.
His own introduction to the book talks about why he wrote it — his first. “I felt the story of a young lad from a humble village in Bihar, who ended up occupying the corner room in one of India’s biggest business corporations and was the longest-serving chairman of a public sector company, needed telling.” He wanted to share the art of survival in the labyrinth in which public sector companies operate and also to share his homespun and locally contextualised management principles, many of which seem too simplistic, or too grand. Here is a sampler: “People should be managed loosely but performance should be managed tightly” or “All are equal but the stars must shine”.
Grids of Change — which is the title of the book — thus straddles many worlds. It is a corporate story of a public sector company with a heart; it is a management guidebook; and it is also the personal story of the man at the helm. One could find some interesting takeaways from each of the three facets of the book. However, at a time when so much is happening in the world of power transmission, with the recent stimulus package in the US earmarking billions of dollars for a smart grid, the lack of any serious discussion on next generation grids in India stands out.
This exclusion becomes even more stark when taken in with Singh”s idea of what a national power grid is. “I do see the national electricity grid as a parable for nation-building, especially in a vast, varied country such as India. A grid teaches its stakeholders to share and cooperate, to become mutually dependent and to realise that the collective is worth much more than the individual element. Isn’t that the essence of nationhood?” That is quite a tall order for a set of dumb-wires!
GRIDS OF CHANGE
Managing Power Games And Power Lines
Rajendra Prasad Singh
Penguin
150 pages; Rs 399
