کیا اہل جہاں تجھ کو ستم گر نہیں کہتے
کہتے تو ہیں لیکن ترے منہ پر نہیں کہتے
(Everyone names the culprit, once the room feels safe.
No one says it to the face that signs the bill.)
I. Ahmad Wani:
A few weeks ago I visited an acquaintance whose office sits inside a government building in Srinagar. The same building also houses the private bureau of a well-known newspaper. While I waited, I saw a paper on the shoe rack by the door. It was an electricity bill. The amount was ₹5.60 lakh.
I thought a decimal point had slipped somewhere. So I checked more addresses. Jawahar Nagar. The Badshah flats. Ten more government-linked offices. Ten more bills. Each one sat between ₹4 lakh and ₹7 lakh. Each one looked undisturbed, like the meter reader had come, sighed, and walked away.
Somewhere else in the Valley, a junior engineer was getting his salary cut for missing a loss target he did not create.
This Summer, Again (July 2026)
It is July 2026 now, peak summer, and the cuts are back on schedule. On July 19, KPDCL announced planned shutdowns at the Baglihar and Salal power stations for flushing and maintenance. The two together supply a large share of summer power in the Valley. Their shutdown created a gap of about 1,000 megawatts. The department said it would buy short-term power from the exchange to cover the hole. Consumers were told to expect cuts until the work finished.
Three weeks earlier, in June, residents in Srinagar’s Rawalpora area were asking a simple question. Rawalpora is fully metered. People there pay their bills on time. Yet the area was facing long, unannounced outages, day after day. What made the timing strange is that generation was unusually high that week. Central sector projects allotted to J&K were producing around 2,108 megawatts. Locally owned projects added another 1,063 megawatts. Combined, that is over 3,100 megawatts, more than J&K normally sees even in a good summer. On top of that, the UT was still importing about 1,000 more megawatts from the national grid. There was more power sitting in the system than usual. People were still sitting in the dark.
That is not a generation problem. That is a delivery problem. The pipe cannot carry what the plant makes.
The state’s own Economic Survey for 2025-26 admits as much. It records peak demand at close to 3,550 megawatts against peak availability of about 3,133 megawatts, a shortfall near 417 megawatts, or roughly 14 percent. Jammu city bakes past 40 degrees in summer and every air conditioner in every government office pushes demand higher. Srinagar gets its turn in winter, when heating load spikes and hydel output drops because rivers run low. Different season, same complaint: the schedule gets announced, then ignored.
Not New, Just Repeated
None of this is a new story. It is an old story that keeps finding a new summer to happen in.
Go back to 2022. Kashmir’s discom announced curtailment of up to 56 hours a week in non-metered areas that winter, right after a tariff hike of 8 to 22 percent. Non-metered households got 8 hours of cuts a day. Metered households got 4.5 hours. Demand was already over 1,900 megawatts, heading past 2,000. Supply was stuck between 1,600 and 1,700. Local generation had fallen to just 150 megawatts because water levels were low. People had been promised round-the-clock power under earlier slogans about a “Naya Kashmir.” They got a curtailment chart instead, broken into morning, day, and evening slots, like a train timetable for darkness.
Go back further, to 2015. A chief minister had to personally order the department to buy 250 extra megawatts of power to get through Ramadan and the summer heat, while also asking for checks on pilferage during the same meeting. The pattern was already visible a decade ago: buy more power for the peak, and in the same breath, admit that theft is eating the gains.
Every year the names change. Sayeed becomes Mufti, Mufti becomes Sinha, Sinha becomes Abdullah. The chart of cuts and promises stays almost exactly the same.
The Loss Numbers
Now to the number that actually explains the outages better than any hydro shutdown does.
Jammu and Kashmir has posted the highest power losses in India for three years running. These are called AT&C losses, short for Aggregate Technical and Commercial losses. In plain words, it is the share of electricity that goes in at one end of the wire and never gets paid for at the other end.
KPDCL’s own figures show the scale. In FY23, losses stood at 59.59 percent against a target of 54 percent. In FY24, losses fell to 51.98 percent, but the target that year was 44 percent, so the miss was still wide. In FY25, losses dropped further to 33.54 percent, this time beating a 44 percent target. For FY26, the target is set at 34 percent.
Compare that to the rest of the country. The national average AT&C loss is 15.04 percent. So even after three straight years of improvement, KPDCL is still cutting its losses in half compared to where it needs to be to just match the national average, not beat it. J&K remains the worst performer in India on this measure, for the third year straight.
Punish the Small, Spare the Big
Faced with that gap, the Power Development Department picked its target. Not the unpaid ₹5.60 lakh bill on a shoe rack. Not the flats in a VIP colony. The department issued an order this year that says officers and staff in any division, sub-division, or feeder with losses above 40 percent can have up to 50 percent of their salary deducted.
Alongside the salary order came a revised Load Curtailment Plan. Feeders with losses under 15 percent get no cuts at all. Feeders between 15 and 40 percent get three hours of cuts a day, up from two. Feeders above 40 percent get six hours, up from four. JPDCL and KPDCL were also told to send show-cause notices to every underperforming division and feeder. And JKPCL was asked to explore power-banking deals with other states between January and March 2026, just to trim the power purchase bill.
Read all of that together and a pattern appears. The punishment lands on linemen, junior engineers, and entire neighborhoods that get their power cut for six hours a day. It does not land on whoever owns the ₹5.60 lakh bill that sat untouched on a shoe rack. The people with the least power to fix the leak carry the heaviest part of the fix.
The Math of Theft
Put a number on it and the picture gets sharper. For roughly every ₹100 of power the UT buys, it collects payment for about ₹65 of it. The other ₹35 does not vanish into thin air. It goes somewhere.
Some of it leaks out through old wires, weak transformers, and overloaded lines that were never built for today’s load. Some of it, based on the shoe rack tour, flows quite comfortably into government quarters, press offices tucked inside official buildings, and well-placed addresses that never quite make it onto a disconnection list. Either way, the ordinary taxpayer pays twice. Once as a consumer who pays the bill on time. Again as a citizen whose taxes cover the subsidy that plugs the hole left by everyone who did not pay.
Money Down the Wrong Pipe
While that hole stays open, the big money keeps flowing into generation.
Four Chenab valley hydro projects, Pakal Dul, Kiru, Kwar, and Ratle, together account for roughly ₹28,000 crore in sanctioned cost, up from an original ₹22,208 crore. Pakal Dul alone has seen its cost rise 57 percent to about ₹12,728 crore, and its schedule slip from an original April 2020 date to a new target of March 2027, nearly seven years late. Kiru’s cost is up 26 percent to around ₹5,409 crore, also pushed to March 2027 against an original September 2023 date. Kwar and Ratle have avoided cost overruns so far, but Kwar is now due only by December 2027, and Ratle by November 2028.
Beyond these four, the government counts 15 power projects in total, adding up to 7,768 megawatts at different stages, some still years from approval. Two smaller ones, New Ganderbal at 93 megawatts and Lower Kalnai at 48 megawatts, are just reaching the award stage. Seven more projects worth 4,563.5 megawatts are still waiting on basic clearances.
Now set that beside a small, real fix. In July this year, the government approved an upgrade of the Kathua grid station, raising its capacity from three transformers of 50 MVA each to four. The cost: ₹15.22 crore. It was announced with real pride, as a step to cut overloading and improve supply reliability in Kathua and nearby areas.
Read the two numbers side by side. Thousands of crores for new dams. Fifteen crore for a grid station that actually touches how power reaches homes. It is possible to add 3,000 more megawatts of generation over the next few years and still run the leakiest distribution network in the country. The problem was never how much power J&K can produce. It is how much disappears between the powerhouse and the electricity bill, and who gets to treat that bill as a suggestion rather than a demand.
Smart Meters, Precise Theft
The government’s main answer to the loss problem is the smart meter. Under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme, or RDSS, J&K has installed 3.81 lakh smart meters since 2024, close to 40 percent of the current target. JPDCL has fitted 1,87,894 meters against a sanctioned target of 7,62,872. KPDCL has fitted 1,93,777 against a target of 7,27,855. An earlier phase, run between 2020 and 2022, had already installed 1.5 lakh meters in select parts of Jammu and Srinagar. Total planned spend under RDSS across loss reduction and metering work comes to about ₹5,762 crore.
This is genuine progress, and it deserves to be said plainly. But a smart meter on a bungalow that never gets billed, or never gets its bill enforced, does not solve anything. It just produces a sharper, more detailed digital record of the same old theft. Precision is not the same thing as collection. A meter can tell you exactly how much power a VIP colony used last month. It cannot make anyone actually pay for it.
Solar Promises
Solar power gets talked about a great deal in every review meeting, and some of the talk is now turning into tenders. JAKEDA, the state renewable energy agency, floated bids for 344 megawatts of rooftop solar, split between government buildings and household RESCO installations. As of late 2024, only 36 megawatts of that tender had actually been installed. Under the central PM Surya Ghar scheme, 16,212 rooftop systems had gone up across the UT by December 2025, a number that sounds large until you convert it to actual megawatts, which lands far short of the headline targets. JPDCL has now floated a fresh tender for 154 megawatts of rooftop solar aimed at Antyodaya households, with bids due in August 2026. Under the PM-KUSUM scheme, 3,601 solar pumps were installed out of an allotted 5,000 by the end of November 2025.
Add up every scheme, every tender, every installed panel, and the honest total sits well under 200 megawatts actually commissioned so far, even though the announced pipeline across all schemes stretches into the hundreds of megawatts, with a stated goal of 500 megawatts by 2030. If some official figure says close to 200 megawatts is already up and running, take it as the high end of the claim, not the confirmed floor. Either way, the point holds. Even generous solar numbers do nothing to fix outages in a fully metered, bill-paying neighborhood like Rawalpora, because solar power still has to travel down the same old wires and through the same unbilled colonies before it reaches anyone’s kitchen light.
Demand Keeps Climbing
None of this is happening in a system with flat demand. Peak power demand in J&K rose from about 2,675 megawatts in 2016-17 to over 3,000 megawatts today. Officials project demand will climb close to 15 percent again in 2026-27, needing roughly 1,862 million extra units of power. Electricity use per person rose from 1,322 units a year in 2020-21 to 1,507 units in 2023-24, a jump of more than 13 percent in four years. Hydel generation from local projects crossed 16,300 million units in 2023-24 alone.
Every one of these numbers points the same way. More people, more appliances, more demand, every single year. A system already losing a third of its power cannot keep absorbing that growth by building more dams. It needs to stop the leak first.
Closing the Tap
So here is a plain suggestion, free of charge, unlike the power apparently is for some. Before the next foundation stone gets laid for the next mega-project, send someone to Jawahar Nagar with a ledger and the will to use it. Meter the shoe racks. Bill the bureaus. Disconnect the well-connected before docking a lineman’s pay. Match the punishment to the theft, not to the rank of the person who can least afford to fight back.
The Chenab will still be there next year, and the year after. New dams will keep getting foundation stones and ribbon-cuttings, on schedule or three years late. The ₹5.60 lakh bill, judging by how long it has already sat gathering dust on that shoe rack, will probably still be there too. People will keep saying so, in every room except the one where it might change something. That has always been the easier kind of honesty. The harder kind is saying it to the face that holds the ledger.
