The mention of filmmakers Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar, or "actors" Loha Singh and Ritu Maheshwari, may make you wonder what we are talking about. Just who are they, and how come you had never heard anything about them? Neither had I. Until, surprise of surprises, an 80-minute documentary appeared last week at many of our mainstream, multiscreen halls, of course only for odd shows at unpopular timings. It got great reviews and the doorman at the cineplex at the South Delhi mall where I saw it said earlier shows had quite a few paying customers. I watched the 3.45 p.m. show on Sunday with just 15 others in the hall. So any which way, it wasn't even a surprise talking point like Peepli [Live].

We talk about Fahad and Deepti because they must rank amongst our bravest creative young people for making Katiyabaaz, a documentary only in name, a dramatic, shocking and eye-opening film about organised power theft in our rotting cities. In this case, one of the most rotten of all, Kanpur. We talk about the lead characters, Loha Singh and Ritu Maheshwari, because they are real people, playing themselves with courage and honesty. Loha Singh, a short, taut man with fingers scarred and bent from electric shocks, is the city's champion "katiyabaaz", or one who steals power by throwing a "katiya", a bent wire, over someone else's supply. When all else fails and when the need for power gets desperate, people turn to Loha Singh. And he steals for you from somebody and makes a living. The bonus: you do not even have to pay for that power.

The only one trying to fight back is Maheshwari, young IAS officer posted as chief executive of the Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO). Here, a totally sarkari company is bankrupted several times over, with uncollected dues of more than Rs 2,000 crore already. It is unable to buy power from the grid or invest in new transformers, which catch fire all the time, a familiar summer scene in most of our cities.

Hers is an impossible job, and she is probably not even expected to do it sincerely. But she tries, falls foul of the local Samajwadi Party MLA, Irfan Solanki, and is transferred within 11 months. This is a likely story in Uttar Pradesh. But when I come home and Google, it turns out she is a real person, a 2003-batch IAS officer, a first division graduate from Punjab Engineering College, and her UPSC profile tells you a history of short tenures. So when she joyfully tells the camera that her kid had completed an entire year in one school at least once, you know what she is talking about. While we celebrate Ashok Khemka in Haryana, and Durga Shakti Nagpal in Uttar Pradesh, this is one more IAS officer willing to take on the system, even play herself in a documentary. And equally brave Mr Loha Singh, with his gaalis and lisp.

The film's credits say Loha Singh, Ritu Maheshwari and the people of Kanpur. It could as well have included all the rest of us, the people of India, particularly urban India. We surely are a nation of "freedom fighters" in the perverse sense that we want everything free, particularly when it is provided by the government, from grain to highways, from water to power. This sentiment is much stronger in our cities. In an Indian city you want to pay the municipality, the taxman and certainly the bijliwala nothing. On power, you either bribe the inspector or rent a "katiyabaaz". When electricity was handled by old fashioned government departments, it was simpler. But power reform has resulted in unbundling of state electricity boards in most states, and the offsprings are separate generation, transmission and distribution companies (usually called gencos, transcos and discoms).

These are still government owned, tariffs are determined by a regulator, but their balance sheets must be self-sustaining. And if they aren't, the state has to pay them out of its budget. Only in some large cities-Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Delhi, for example- has power been privatised.

Bijli aur maut ka kya bharosa, kab aa jaye, said Dinesh Chandra Mishra, sitting under a stationary fan in Saidapur village, Uttar Pradesh. Bijli aur maut ka kya bharosa, kab aa jaye, said Dinesh Chandra Mishra, sitting under a stationary fan in Saidapur village, Uttar Pradesh.

Katiyabaaz is the most effective show-and-tell so far on what really lies behind India's grave power crisis. Over the years, I have travelled across the country in the course of many elections and one thing everybody, everywhere is most bitter about is power shortage. Governments promise more power plants, this many thousand megawatts by such and such year. But nobody wants to tell you that while there is a shortfall, it isn't really so much as to completely blight our lives. The problem is, it costs money to produce power, and we, the people, are not willing to pay for it.

My colleague, India Today (Hindi) Editor Anshuman Tiwari, points me to a bunch of data on the surprising realities of India's self-inflicted power crisis. A July 2014 report of the Central Electricity Authority (http://goo.gl/XjFDdN) gives us some interesting facts. Would you believe, for example, that India's overall power shortage for that month was just 3.6 per cent, going up to 3.9 per cent at peak time? In the north, the shortage is 5.8 per cent and in the west and the east a mere 0.9 and 1.7 per cent, respectively, even at peak demand.

Then how does this add up to such a grave crisis?

It's because, first, we are not charged the correct price for power- too many of us, particularly farmers, pay almost nothing. And even when we are, we find ways to not pay. As a result, most of our distribution companies owned by state governments are broke, some as bad as KESCO, many worse. They have no money to buy power, which is now freely traded, or to upgrade distribution infrastructure. And if the head of one of them tries seriously to collect, a fate like Maheshwari's lies ahead. Our power crisis becomes much, much worse than it should be because of our subsidy and free-booting culture and our government's inability to collect its own dues. Because if power distribution was such a bad business, how come all the privately owned utilities, CESC, BSES, etc, are making robust profits?

The CEA report also has a section that gives you data under that dreaded head, T&D losses. In old-fashioned English, it stands for transmission and distribution losses. But ask anybody in the power sector, and they use a more fitting description: theft and dacoity losses. The report gives us figures for 2010-11 and 2011-12 and their losses stand at 23.97 per cent and 23.65 per cent, respectively. Which means, even after 15 years of power reform, nearly a fourth of all power produced and distributed is lost. Most of this we citizens, across all strata, steal. We are an incredible people. We protest about power tariffs. Yet we happily install gensets in our homes and produce our own power with diesel at a much higher cost.

Remember how Arvind Kejriwal struck a chord with us in Delhi when he built his campaign against power bills. The fact is, power in Delhi is a lot better than before, T&D losses are lower. But utilities are private, so they make sure we pay. That we, the "freedom fighters", are not used to doing. That is why we hailed Kejriwal as a saviour when he started employing his IIT engineer's skills to restore our power disconnected due to non-payment. That is why people in Kanpur, and elsewhere in India, pay to steal power, whether they call the technique "katiya" as in Uttar Pradesh, or "kundi" connection as in other northern states. This is somehow as endemic in Uttar Pradesh as copying in examinations. Once again, back to the CEA report, the peak shortage in India's largest state is 23.6 per cent of the north's deficit of 5.8 per cent. That is because people are not paying.

Turn to some stunning bit of research done by two eminent foreign scholars, Professors Miriam Golden (Universities of California and Princeton) and Brian Min (University of Michigan) in a January 2012 paper titled 'Theft and Loss of Electricity in an Indian State', which is Uttar Pradesh (http://goo.gl/GBwH6s). Their most interesting conclusion is that the "extent of power theft varies with the electoral cycle of the state". In an election year, power theft peaks, and not just that, incumbent MLAs in whose areas theft increases are more likely to get reelected. There is no political criminality here, they say, just the usual "capture of public service by local elites". You let me steal power, you protect me if I am caught, and I vote for you. You are a kleptocrat because I am a klepto-voter. By the way, Irfan Solanki was re-elected in Kanpur. Power crisis, therefore, is a story of a cynical, transactional peoplepolitician relationship.

POSTSCRIPT: During this summer's election campaign, I found Dinesh Chandra Mishra, a semi-paralysed retired college teacher, sweat-soaked, stripped to a loincloth, sitting on a cot under a stationary fan in 45-degree heat at Saidapur village, 60 km east of Allahabad. When does power come, I asked.

"Bijli aur maut ka kya bharosa, kab aa jaye (Who knows about electricity and death, who can tell when it will come)."

Our power crisis has made us such fatalists. Truth is, our own greed is responsible for much of this.



- Follow the writer on Twitter @ShekharGupta



