Power to Pak? Twitterati targets Indian envoy
Chidanand Rajghatta
http://http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Power-to-Pak-Twitterati-targets-Indian-envoy/articleshow/16259825.cms
WASHINGTON: Electricity export to energy-starved Pakistan and other neighbouring countries maybe the Indian power elites' idea of a confidence building measure, but it's not finding favour with Indians at the receiving end of outages, least those on social media.
India's ambassador to the US, Nirupama Rao, got singed by twitterati after she boldly backed New Delhi's proposal for a 500 MW cross border transmission to Pakistan which was announced in Parliament on Monday. Rao said in a tweet that India is "also responding to power needs of Nepal and Bangladesh".
The blowback was swift. "Madam, we don't have surplus power on d first place. Doing charity with a hungry belly is not pragmatic," one twitterer wrote. Another tweet, presumably referring to PM Manmohan Singh's support for the idea, snarkily described it as "this Punjabi Pappi-Jhappi diplomacy driven by old men with nostalgia of pre partition" and said it is "not based on realism" . But Rao, widely seen as one of India's ablest diplomats and someone who has taken to social media with gusto, would not be silenced, particularly after one tweet trashed the idea as "top class rubbish".
"Helping one's neighbours cannot be termed 'top class rubbish' as you so dismissively term it! We are not an island ," she shot back. "Why do you automatically assume that this will deprive us of electricity? That is never the intention & it will not be so," she explained in another tweet, adding that India had added 55,000 MW of power to national grid in 2007-12 , including 20,500 mw in FY 2011-12 alone, and capacity is being augmented further.
But the twitterati remained unconvinced. "Ma'am beg ur pardon but u indeed seem to b unaware about the acute power shortage even in Gurgaon n major infra woes," came one response , while another said "This govt has totally lost it."
The Pakistani media, meanwhile, picked up Rao's remarks and gave it wide play in Pakistan.
It was not immediately clear why Rao took on the power export issue, but in a blog posting in the Congressional journal The Hill last week, she stoutly defended India from the international bashing following the July 30-31 national grid collapse, saying it was an "isolated incident" and such "occasional problems should not obscure the substantial progress that has been made" in the power sector. "The spate of articles following the incidents last month focused on what journalists characterized as the dysfunctional nature of the Indian power sector . These were unfair and, in many cases, inaccurate. They certainly didn't highlight the real story: India's electrical outlook is much better now than it ever has been and is getting better at an accelerating rate," Rao wrote.
But on the very morning of her Twitter exchange, the National Public Radio ran a segment on India's blackouts — and it was not pleasant hearing. It reminded listeners that India recently had the world's biggest power outage, affecting 670 million people, or nearly 10% of world population. And even as the reporter sat down to interview a shopkeeper, the lights went out again.
