Article S8.2 Research on the Political Economy of Development and Electricity Sector Reform Seminar Leader: Sunila S. Kale The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, USA kale[at]u.washington.edu The seminar was based on Kale’s doctoral research on the Indian electricity sector reforms during the post-liberalisation period. Kale was interested in studying the political economy of development in India. The electricity sector reforms in the post-liberalisation period in India presented her with a live context within which she could observe and analyse some aspects of the country’s political economy. During the post-liberalisation period, India went through various policy-level changes affecting society in many different ways. For example, electricity generation, transmission, and distribution used to be largely owned by government bodies prior to the reform. The reform process opened up the possibility of private investment in this sector and, consequently, gave rise to a new regulatory role for the government. These changes led to a series of conflicts in the electricity sector, which resulted in increased media attention on the sector. So, it was a “hot topic” to study for a student of political economy. Based on the available literature on India’s political economy (e.g., Kohli, 1989; Sinha, 2003), Kale chose to focus on the subnational level to get a more disaggregated and representative picture. She focused her study on four Indian states, namely Delhi, Orissa, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh. These states were selected in order to allow a broad range of issues to be identified. Delhi being the location of India’s national capital, the reform process here is likely to be influenced by the dynamics of national politics. Orissa was the first Indian state to privatise electricity distribution; Maharashtra joined the reform process much later. Andhra Pradesh, with the highest hydro-electricity generation among all the Indian states presented a technologically distinctive angle. In order to contribute to the discourse of political economy of development, Kale focused on three broad areas to study the ongoing reforms in the Indian electricity sector: (a) political process driving the reform agenda, (b) administrative capacity to manage the reform process, and (c) technological factors impacting the range of alternatives available. Both primary and secondary data were used in the research. Primary data were collected by interviewing State Electricity Board (SEB) officials, politicians, bureaucrats, and social activists. Semi-structured interviews permitted the researcher to probe into the subject matter. Data pertaining to the pre-liberalisation period were collected through secondary sources, such as government publications and parliamentary debates of the period. A comparative study was necessary to make sense of the data collected from the four states. The categories of comparison were first identified by analysing the data into core themes. The next step was to study state-level reform processes as variations on those themes. Results of this analysis had to be interpreted in light of the historical information available on the subject, in order to mark the continuity and discontinuity the results implied in regard to the existing knowledge on the subject. Kale faced challenges during the data collection process. For example, all the relevant historical data were not available for Orissa. She addressed this by using surrogate measures taken from state-level economic surveys and national-level electricity data produced by the Indian Ministry of Power. References Kohli, A. (1989). The state and poverty in India: The politics of reform. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sinha, A. (2003). Rethinking the developmental state model: Divided leviathan and subnational comparisons in India. Comparative Politics, 35(4), 459-476. Reported by Satyendra Chandra Pandey, with inputs from Paromita Goswami, Rahul Thakurta; edited by D. P. Dash. [August 29, 2010] Copyleft Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India Research World (ISSN 0974-2379) http://www1.ximb.ac.in/RW.nsf/pages/Home |
