A recent study by MAIT has brought out a very grim reality about India. The
pathetic power situation, and how most Indian organizations do not have much
hope that things are going to change anytime soon.
The study of 800 organizations dealing in manufacturing, electronics,
telecom, IT services, IT-enabled services, banking and finance, pharmaceutical,
biotechnology, SMEs, retail, hotels, real estate, infrastructure, and hospitals
in seven cities, namely-Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad,
and Pune-covered information on downtime experiences, typical causes and
solutions adopted, reactions to uptime, and so on.
Indian businesses lost Rs 43,205 crore in 2008-09 due to the impact of power
downtime, both scheduled as well as non-scheduled, the study estimates. This
loss has more than doubled since 2003 when it was pegged at Rs 22,000 crore.
While among the various verticals studied, manufacturing was the most adversely
impacted, the impact on IT infrastructure, which drives automation, productivity
and business management, employee productivity and customer management, was to
my mind more significant.
While these organizations are doing contingency planning, the fact is that
poor power supply adds to costs and environment pollution, it brings down
reliability. And if Indian organizations believe that power supply is going to
be problematic for some more years, costs, environment, and reliability will
continue to be a problem. As per the study, over 95 percent organizations have a
power source other than grid supply.
The impact of poor power supply situation in India will be manifold. If we
look at the semi-urban and rural areas, places beyond the metros and big cities,
there is power cut for six to eight hours in a day. These are the locations
where lots of IT and communications/networking equipment is being bought.
Educational institutes are buying, and so are the state governments. How will
these computers run, unless there is good power supply.
Sale of IT and communications products getting affected is not so critical.
What is more important is that organizations, who have deployed IT and other
modern technologies so that they can beat competitors in India and around the
globe, will be on the mercy of generators and other backup solutions.
And what about manufacturing, which as per the MAIT survey seems to be worst
hit? with more intelligence and IT coming into manufacturing systems, power
supply will have a key role.
By the way, city Gurgaon-the BPO capital of India-faces a regular power cut
for eight to 10 hours a day. And we want more BPOs to come up in smaller cities
and towns. For this new government, I would place power as the highest priority
on the infrastructure list.
Ibrahim ahmad
ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in