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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

India doesn't have enough electricity

There's something fundamentally broken about this statement, which suggests a deeper problem - why isn't the market for electricity working in India?

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The grid in India is pretty broken. My dad had dreams of going back to India to retire, but on his last trip he told me housing was now super expensive, the pollution was still terrible, the air not fit to breath and the water still unsafe to drink.

In other countries we take a national grid for granted. In Europe, power can be bought and sold from country to country. India may be lacking in capacity, but even if they're not, the grid is fragile, unreliable and not a national one.

There are over a billion people living there too, in a land mass way smaller than their more populous neighbour to the north (and let's not forget all of China's trouble with pollution as well).

A huge chunk of china is basically uninhabitable.

http://www.china-mike.com/china-travel-tips/tourist-maps/chi...

PS: You can draw a strait line in China with 6% of the population on the larger half, and 94% of the population on the smaller half.

http://www.undertheraedar.com/2012/06/population-of-china.ht...

> You can draw a strait line in China with 6% of the population on the larger half, and 94% of the population on the smaller half.

America's most populous county, Los Angeles County, is approximately the same. The northeastern part is mostly very hot high desert or national forest land (severe building restrictions). By contrast, the southwestern part is coastal and much more suitable for human habitation.

http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/population/density/nei...

In general, Californians live in the third of the state along the Pacific coast.

You could probably do the same in Canada fwiw.

Technically you could draw such a straight line in any country.

You could draw a straight line across any country that divides the population into 6%/94%, but I doubt there are many countries where the 94% side would be smaller than the 6% side for any line.

This is such an interesting idea! Lots of potential.

Given n (city,population, area) tuples for country C, find 2 cities, the line thru which slices C into two land masses M and N. M would then have k tuples and N would have n-k, such that the ratio of aggregate population of k tuples to the aggregate population of n-k would be 90+delta:10-delta, for delta in interval [1,9], whilst simultaneously you have the ratio of the aggregate area of the k tuples to the aggregate area of n-k working out to 1+nabla:1-nabla, for nabla in [0,0.5].

No idea what the optimal algorithm would be, short of brute force so O(n^2).

This is the sort of DS project a HuffPo would run - you can slice up countries not just based on 94:6 population but also crime rate, education, victims of homicide, what have you; all you need in tuples with larger arity.

"tuples with larger arity" is just computer scientist speak for "take more things into account".

Given the generality and popularity of sweepline algorithms in computational geometry, I'm wondering where the problem is here. Can't you just move a sweepline across a given territory in any direction and get a result? If you want maximum outrage (largest value of X in smallest area), I agree that's more complex and I'm not sure how you would prove an optimum result.

Given the city-local nature of most population density, I'd imagine a grow-out-from-cities + line fit model would work fairly well at lower computational complexity.

It'd be curious what different countries look like in terms of gradient decent difficulty on population density. I'd imagine most look fairly similar (densely populated regional urban areas surrounded by rural), but I imagine there are exceptions to some degree out there?

There are not that many city's in any given country so N^2 is probably not a big deal. However, you can get approximate results by drawing a line at every angle through a country and then moving that line up and down. Then just look for city's near any good candidate lines.

> drawing a line at every angle through a country and then moving that line up and down.

This part is quite messy. For every given (c1,c2) city pair, you'd get 1 straight line that connects c1 to c2. Then for every city ck, you need info on whether ck is above that line or below - you can compute that by point-slope geometry with the lat-long coordinates ( given point p(x,y) & line l with some slope, is p above l or below ).

If you want to poke around, the dataset is here: http://seer.cancer.gov/popdata/

Consider a country with utterly uniform population density. It is trivially false that you can draw "a straight line with 6% of the population on the larger half, and 94% of the population on the smaller half" in such a country. I would be very surprised if all countries in the world were far enough from "uniform population density" for your statement to apply to them.

But you couldnt draw a straight line that has half the land area on each side yet 94/6% split of population.

True enough. Though Canada has more land than China and less than 3% of China's population. So, it's not nearly as big a deal.

Is it really uninhabitable? The territories in the north maybe too harsh, but with global warming helping too I think the southern half is quite alright, which is huge. It's all forest, lots of lakes, no lack of water and not too high, and no desert.

On the western half:

The 'low' areas have minimal rainfall and are 1KM over sea level. http://www.chinamaps.org/china/china-map-of-precipitation-an...

The high areas get a little more rainfall, but are mostly 4-5+km over sea level. http://www.china-food-security.org/data/maps/dem/dem_h.htm

Combine them and you can see why the population map looks the way it does. http://www.china-mike.com/china-travel-tips/tourist-maps/chi...

Uhm... Canada, not China. I responded to the comment that said

    > You could probably do the same in Canada fwiw.

I would not ask about China, I've seen enough documentaries about their deserts and high plateaus. Some of them about the silk road, which was not an easy one because of that geography.

From what I see, there's a pretty good correlation between the population density map (https://www.britannica.com/place/Canada/images-videos/Popula...) and the portion of Canada at least sporadically covered by permafrost. (http://www.enr.gov.nt.ca/state-environment/13-permafrost)

In addition to the rather obvious climate this implies (eg, rather cold), from what I understand, building anything on permafrost is very challenging.

"sporadically covered by permafrost" - I think you're confused as to the permanency of permafrost.

It's no more uninhabitable than the uninhabitable areas of China. But it is non-arable.

Most of the eastern half of Canada north of a certain is "Canadian shield" and is granite shield rock with little if any topsoil.

The other half is boreal forest and some of it is indeed farmed to a fairly high latittude (central Alberta where I'm from) but once you get up high enough the growing degree days are not sufficient to grow a lot of crops. It's good for grazing if that. And also fairly arid in spots.

And the rest is mountains, or arctic.

Canada and China are roughly the same size.

Tibetless China is still a lot bigger than India and doesn't have that 94% property. The spirit of the GP's comment holds, I think.

China:

  ~94% of 1.357b = 1.28 billion population. 
  ~40% of 3.7 mill = 1.5 million square miles.
  = ~0.85 billion people per million square miles.

India

  1.252 billion people on
  1.269 million mi
  =~ 1 billion people per million square miles.

So, India is around 15% denser. Of course you can avoid the strait line cut and push China's density much higher, but the point is they are not that far off where people actually live.

Where are you getting the 40% figure from? Are you saying that Tibet(-ish) is 60% of the land area of China?

Eyeballing: http://www.undertheraedar.com/2012/06/population-of-china.ht.... Tibet is part of that side with 6% of the population, but rainfall is a major issue limiting population over a much larger area.

I'd be interested in knowing if all housing prices in India are going up or just for certain demographics. For example, I'd assume that there is a large burgeoning middle class based on tech / offshoring in places like Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. And also, there are probably a lot of newly minted millionaires that are involved in politics, finance, etc. - a lot of investment money has gone to India in the last 20 years.

But are the rents even increasing for the majority poor that live in the very cramped areas surrounding most cities? How about the rural population?

I ask because, while it makes sense that places like London, SF, and Vancouver would have huge property price increases due to increases in demand (foreign wealth, start-up success, etc.) it seems very disturbing that more and more areas where wages have simply not risen at all for decades are also going through prices increases.

For example, the rents in the Midwest city I come from have gone up about 50% in the last 7 or 8 years, though housing itself has not. Wages have actually gone down, adjusted for inflation.

As far as I know real-estate prices in almost all of the cities are going up, even after adjusting inflation. Rents are low because of really high supply. Wages have gone down post inflation. Most people attribute the ever increasing prices of real-estate to illegal money/back economy, there are estimates that 23%-26% of Indian economy is unreported/black.

> a land mass way smaller than their more populous neighbour to the north

Is the huge amount part of the relatively uninhabited himalaya accounted for in that statement?

1. Most Indian power generation is Coal, there are hydel, and Nuclear is stuck in Gen2 (thanks to sanctions due to Nuke testing - the current Gen is 5)

2. There is scarcity of Coal, and Coal that is mined in India is high-soot

3. The demand for electricity outstrips Supply.

4. The supply never caught up with the demand because Transmission lines are owned by Government(state-level) and there is rampant theft

5. Because of theft and subsidies money is lost by government and the more the cost of generation the more loss the government will incur, so renewable is mostly costed out till recently.

There is hope though, Russia is building six nuclear power plants in India, more dams are coming online and investments in Renewables have increased.

Once distributed solar becomes affordable, the electricity owes in many parts of India would diminish or become tolerable.

I am afraid this picture is far from accurate. Power plants on the whole are running at a very low PLF for some time. Very cheap power is available in the short term markets[1]. The transmission system has also improved in the last two years and now prices are more or less uniform across the country[1].

Last mile distribution infrastructure is still a WIP in many places but the real problem is financial. Many distribution companies are owned by state govts. and unable to charge/recover for the electricity they distribute. This incentivizes them to procure/supply as little power as possible. Many states have now opted for a financial restructuring [2] and I expect demand will pick up sharply.

[1] http://www.vidyutpravah.in/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ujwal_DISCOM_Assurance_Yojana

#2 may be outdated. #3 can be debated, but there were brown-outs and black-outs during the summer.

Things have improved, but the pace is not something to write home about.

Complaining about pace is moving the goal posts here, and yes power shortages are a lot scarcer.

I sell gensets in the southern states and the market is shrinking.

Additionally what's being missed in this entire chain is that the new CPCB norms were released a few years ago and all gensets sold in india now conform to it one way or the other.

To still add to this - most gensets don't run as much as they are able to. For a majority of sets they run very little in the span of years.

The OP gave an example where power was not given to a mall due to corruption, not lack of power.

I'm not sure there is really a scarcity of coal. Market prices are low by historical standards and India is currently looking at ways to expand coal exports because of overproduction and record stockpiles at power plants.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-05/world-s-bi...

India currently has sufficient electricity but the distribution system remains broken.

> why isn't the market for electricity working in India?

Electricity in India is a government monopoly. Even using a generator is illegal if you produce electricity above certain level. In very few cities government has allowed private players like Tata and Reliance to produce electricity and yet given them a complete monopoly over certain parts of the city.

Land acquisition in India is a big mess. People dont have proper property rights, clear land titles etc. It is illegal for a private company to buy land for commercial purposes if the land is not under particular zone. For example let us say I want to build my own power-lines over 100miles. I cant erect a pole in a farmland because erecting a poll is a commercial activity and the land is meant for farming only.

So the companies have to ask government to acquire land. It is a huge corrupt mess.

Electricity is unaffordable to vast mass of people without heavy subsidy. It is same with every infrastructure sector. One can say well phones are available and affordable to 1.1 billion Indian people. However ARPU for telecom companies is less than $2/month which might be one of the lowest in the world. Most companies are in heavy debt with not much to upgrade infrastructure as a result user count is getting very high but quality of network is getting lower.

Any infrastructure sector which requires heavy investment to produce but once there can be used by anyone will remain in bad shape. That is why India has many world class hospitals, 5-star hotels etc because they can be made exclusively available to those who can afford. While roads, piped water supply, sewage systems, public transport, education remain in terrible shape.

Exploding demand and insufficient supply. Annual growth in electricity usage is around 6%.

Investment into electric infrastructure is not sufficient. Coal provides almost 3/4 of the electricity.

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