Criminalisation of Politics-Empowerment of Voter

Rather than rushing through such reforms and simply duplicating the OER Act in other states, what is needed is a radical but cautious approach. The important step in this direction would be to install a sabotage-proof regulatory structure and to test to see whether it can achieve our aim of bringing in rational- decision-making in the functioning of the power sector by eliminating government interference and influence of vested interests. A blind rush to privatisation and unbundling, with a naive belief that this is the time to remove the government and we can sort out all other problems later will only further aggravate the current crisis. We would end up with a sell-off of public assets worth thousands of crores of rupees to private parties and with disastrous long-term, irreversible contracts with private utilities to honour. The cost of such eventualities will be far higher than the costs due to the delays involved in a cautious or 'test and improve' approach.