Always Breakdown Norochcholai, Always Election Mode Rajapaksa Government
Rajan Philips
For several days now there have been many news reports and editorials about the state of affairs at Lanka’s first coal-fired power plant at Norochcholai, which is also the first Chinese-built power plant in the country. Hapless consumers are bracing for blackouts or higher tariffs, or both. And the only people answering questions about Norochcholai are the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) Engineers. No Minister, no all-powerful Secretary, and no charming Percy, the President – have been either seen or heard on the matter. There is an old maxim among policy analysts – there is no policy matter that is purely technical and which can be solved entirely through technical means.
And on a matter such as Norochcholai, the subject Minister must be seen and heard not only in the public domain, assuring the people, but also in the technical and professional realms, making sure that the right professionals and the right resources are assigned to get the problem fixed. And more, to find out what went wrong at Norochcholai, why is the plant in ‘always breakdown’ mode, what can be done with this Chinese albatross, and how such mishaps can be prevented in future power plants? Engineers and their technical inputs are a necessary part of this process but they alone cannot ask all the searching questions and provide comprehensive answers.
Further, this is also a matter that merits the President’s personal interest and intervention. I cannot think of any other matter that arose this week as being more critical and important than the Norochcholai breakdown. And it is not a matter that propped up suddenly day before yesterday. The fuse went off last April (2013) when the government introduced ridiculously conceived tariff increases that made no sense technically and hit the people hard in their pockets. Politically inexplicably, the tariff increases came when hydropower generation was at full throttle with the reservoirs brimful, prompting an electric spat between the ex (Patali Champika Ranawaka) and the current (Pavithradevi Wanniarachchi) Ministers in charge of Power and Energy. It was Patali vs Pavithra, as I called it then. Good enough for tele-drama, but the people were in no mood for cheap amusements.
Even then the President ignored Vasudeva Nanayakara’s plea for an emergency cabinet meeting and limited himself to making casual assurances at his monthly media breakfast – that the rate hikes were “a temporary measure taken to recover the losses incurred”, and that the rates would come down once the second and third phases of the Norochcholai coal power plant were completed, as then expected, by December 2013. Never mind that electricity experts immediately contradicted the claim that the rate hikes were a temporary blip. Never mind also that barely within days of presidential nonchalance, DEW Gunasekara, the government’s senior minister and only one in possession of wisdom, spoke to IMF officials in Colombo of “the catastrophic situation in the power sector”. What the IMF officials heard from DEW was not heeded by the President.
