Let them eat cake.....Have no power of 220V? Take some lightning of 300 million volts

Maharashtra, India’s richest state, has many problems but this is kind of ironic.

It does not have electricity to support its burgeoning economy. Most of its towns and villages are suffering from planned and unplanned “load-shedding”. When a commodity become so precious you would think the state must be guarding it well.

Far from that. Indian Express dated June 3 2007 reports that even the city of Pune has large-scale theft of power. In some areas it goes as high as 36%.
India’s powerful central minister SharadPawar’s constituency- Baramati (adjacent to Pune)- has as much as 45% theft. (No wonder his voters are so happy with him!)

Now surely such electricity-less (remember both electricity and lightning have a single word in Marathi ‘Veej’) state should not suffer from deaths by lightning.

No such luck. In past one year alone, more than 650 people have lost their lives to lightning. This is as per survey done by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. For past few years, IITM has been studying killer lightning during monsoon.. Are its researchers as dumfounded as below?


Artist: Robert J. Day The New Yorker 28 March 1964