From Lattus to Lasers

The history of electricity in India traces an inverted arc – like a smiley – which starts in the colonial period with private electricity capacity leading, regresses to a mode of near complete public sector monopoly by the 1980s and then traces the upward incline to a near 50% share for private electricity suppliers – not a full smiley but a slightly lop-sided one. The half-smile – like Mona Lisa’s – masks long periods of misallocation of public capital, unabashed populism, and careless adherence to ‘path dependencies’ which plagues bureaucracies the world over.