Citizen Access to Corporatized Power Services in Manipur, Northeastern India

Abstract

The state of Manipur in the northeastern region of India, along with a fragmented state-society relationship also suffers from the twin problems of limited public infrastructure and poor state capability to deliver public services. Power services in Manipur suffered from the dual problem of weak power generation and limited state capability to ensure citizens’ access to power services. Following the policy recommendations of the Government of India and the Electricity Act of 2003, to improve the delivery of power services the government of Manipur unbundled the electricity department into two entities Manipur State Power Corporation Limited (MSPCL) and Manipur State Power Distribution Corporatization Limited (MSPDCL) in 2014. Corporatization separated the functions of allocation and distribution of power services and transformed the power sector from a bureaucratic organization into an arms-length, contract-based managerial unit, to function as a corporate entity. Corporatization along with the use of pre-paid meters, user-friendly services like easy ways of recharging the pre-paid meters, and call center services have profoundly improved the state’s capability to deliver power services. This paper is based on a survey amongst 200 households through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires in 2019-2020 in the urban areas of the two valley districts of Imphal West and Bishnupur in India. The survey focused on the capability of the state institutions to deliver power services, citizens’ responses to the reforms in the delivery of power services, and the sustainability of these reforms in building state capability. The response from the survey revealed that corporatization has improved citizens’ access to power services, however, the lack of additional accountability checks and performance-based management would, in the long run, affect MSPDCL’s delivery of power services, and Manipur’s corporatization model. The research, however, was undertaken in the pre-Covid period, hence citizens’ access to services in the post-Covid world needs to be re-examined in future research.

Keywords:  Citizens, Corporatization, Accountability, Governance