There was a time in Kashmir when an increase in electricity tariff was not buried in tables of an Aggregate Revenue Requirement or explained through regulatory jargon. It could bring Srinagar to a halt.The summer of 1988 remains its starkest reminder. A hike in electricity rates by Farooq Abdullah Government triggered a traders’ protest that rapidly grew into a wider agitation. On June 10, a city-wide bandh turned violent across Khanyar, Bohri Kadal and Zaina Kadal. Contemporary reporting recorded clashes, tear-gas and police firing in which three civilians got killed that day; later accounts put the toll during the wider agitation still higher.The episode left successive governments with a lesson they would not easily forget: power tariff was politically combustible. A hike could unite households, traders and businesses in protest and hand the opposition a potent weapon against the government of the day. Electricity pricing therefore became as much a political calculation as an economic one.

An anecdote my father often narrated captures how the matter was politically charged even in 1960s and early 1970s. He recalled a towering political leader telling a public gathering at Eidgah, Srinagar, that if electricity linemen came with ladders to disconnect supply, people should pull away their ladders. It shows that the resistance to electricity charges was already a potent instrument of popular mobilisation and opposition politics, long before the dramatic tariff agitation of 1988.

For years thereafter, governments were reluctant to place rising power costs directly upon consumers. Tariffs remained frozen for long periods even as the cost of purchasing and supplying electricity rose. The deficit did not disappear; Government largely carried it. Politically, absorbing the gap in the exchequer was often safer than allowing it to appear in household electricity bills.

Then came power-sector reforms and, with that, the J&K State Electricity Regulatory Commission. Tariff regulations were framed in 2005 and PDD filed its first tariff petition covering FY 2006-07 and 2007-08. After inviting objections and holding public hearings, JKSERC issued its first retail tariff order on March 28, 2007.

I happened to be heading a leading business chamber in Kashmir when the first tariff petition came before JKSERC. The process then was both elaborate and participatory. PDD would file its petition, following which our organisation would study the proposals and submit detailed objections on various technical, financial and consumer-related aspects. The objections received from........

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