Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman late on Tuesday trashed reports that India is facing a coal shortage, and said, in fact, the country is power surplus.
“Absolute baseless! There is no shortage of anything. In fact, if I recall the Power Minister’s statement, every power-producing installation has the next four days’ stock absolutely available within their own premises and the supply chain has not broken at all,” she said at Harvard Kennedy School, Boston, USA, according to media reports.
Amid reports about the alleged shortage, Sitharaman said that Union Power Minister R. K. Singh clarified only two days ago that absolutely baseless information about coal shortage or depleted inventories is floating around.
Her assertion came when, during the conversation organized by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Professor Lawrence Summers asked the minister about energy shortage and reports of reduced coal inventories in India. Sitharaman said there will be no shortage of coal supply.
“We are also taking a fairly good amount of risks to see what the basket of energy is available for India, how much is based on fossil fuel and how much comes from renewables and we are always looking at ways in which it can be shifted in favor of renewable energy. So the picture is not of short supply, but it’s also the picture of newer components into the basket,” she said.
On the vaccination drive in India against the Covid-19 pandemic and how India administered nearly a billion doses, Sitharaman said over the decades, India has steadily built up this institutional arrangement where primary health centers exist down to the village level. They take care of basic requirements of the fundamental primary care that has to be given to patients in those areas. These centers have, over the years, undertaken various inoculations for newborn children at periodic intervals. India has been very successful in containing the spread of polio, she said.
Also, Sitharaman said, periodic malaria or seasonal illnesses, for which doctors attend to patients in different regions, have given India the capacity to handle large epidemic-proportion illnesses and to treat them.
“As soon as the vaccines became available, our systems were ready to fan out, even go to some of the far-flung areas, and give the doses to the people for free. So, institutional arrangement in India has always been the framework built over the years”, she said.
The only question regarding the vaccines was whether they had to be preserved at a certain temperature, to be carried around and distributed across India.
“Luckily the two vaccines we have largely used are quite amenable to the Indian conditions and therefore the logistics required for moving them from one place to another did not pose quite a challenge and therefore we’ve been successful”, she said.
Covishield is the Indian version of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine produced under a license from them by the Serum Institute of India (SII). Covaxin is the indigenous vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech.
Sitharaman also noted that India has been giving vaccines for free through some of the bilateral arrangements with countries.