We love contracts.

Indian politicians love to sign contracts. Our government signs endless Memorandums of Understanding with foreign countries, dishes out contracts for various projects that never get built and signs bilateral trade deals with trade blocs all over the world which end up benefiting other countries. After a 2 hour meeting our Coal Minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal and Power Minister, Jyotiraditya Scindia have decided to sign pacts between power producers and the government owned Coal India Ltd to supply coal to power stations. After a " freewheeling and positive discussion " Mr Jaiswal said," Most of the issues related to Fuel Supply Agreements have been addressed. The FSAs ( between power companies and CIL ) are likely to be signed in a month's time." TOI, 22 December. The coal is in India and India needs power. Ergo, dig it out and supply it to power stations. What is the need for signing pacts and why should it have to wait one month? Since India has huge reserves of coal and CIL is a government company there is no need to look at international prices. Cover the cost of mining and transport to keep it cheap and supply cheap power to manufacturing companies so that our economy grows. After the massive blackout at the end of June the then Power Minister, Sushilkumar Shinde said," We got electricity in a matter of hours....people should appreciate how work is done at the grid." Comparing with the USA where an accidental shutdown of the grid in 2003 took 4 days to restore in some parts he said,".....in the USA light does not come for 4 days, here we got it in a matter of hours." Not quite. In the US such instances are rare whereas blackouts, euphemistically known as load shedding, is a daily occurrence in India. Google alone uses more electricity than a small city does in India. Mr Anil Aggarwal, CEO of Vedanta group writes," Our import bill stands at $485 billion of which oil is $150 billion, close to 10% of the GDP. Gold, silver, coal and fertiliser are the other main items. With 3.5 billion tonnes of bauxite we produce 1.5 million tonnes of aluminium while China with no bauxite produces 20 million tonnes. We could add $1 trillion to our economy in 3-4 years." Between 2010 and 2011 the government awarded 42,932 km of highway projects of which 1781 km was actually constructed. For 2011-12, 60,396 km of roads were awarded but only 2248 km were built. As of April 2011, 101 oil and gas exploration contracts have been awarded. Only 6 have started production. The reason is that there are 47 ministries so any company wishing to build a road, mine coal or start a power plant has to go round begging for hundreds of licenses. Meanwhile illegal mines are operating merrily and exporting our national resources while we continue to sign pacts. With mountains of paper we may have a paper mine someday.