I suspect the semantics are about how long in advance it's planned. A day or two? Planned. An hour? Hard sell.
Example from year 2003 (city = Pune) [1]. Its hard to read
Excerpt:
The load shedding schedule is as follows:
Group A: Monday 8 am to 11 am, Tuesday 11 am to 2 pm,Wednesday 3 to 6 pm, Saturday 11 am to 2 pm: Navi Peth, Gultekdi I and II, Dhankawdi, Padmawati, Old Parvati I and II, SNDT, G Block, Parsi agiary, City Apollo, Sant Tukaram, Kharalwadi.
Group B: Monday 11 am to 2 pm, Tuesday 3 pm to 6 pm, Friday 8 am to 11 am
Useless industries like RO water, gensets, inverters etc are so much larger in India because of governmental abdication of responsibility due to political compulsions. Once you have your own house, or live in a gated community/highrise with its own water/power infra, you get almost western levels of comfort without the messiness of the outside world.
Btw, what you describe is also true of malls. Basically, every country has shiny malls.
It is better to have electricity 24x7 but only 50 watts to run a fridge, phone charger and one lightbulb, than to have electricity 3 hours a day but be running 1000 watts of airconditioners.
I guess perhaps energy theft was too hard to police?
“And there was no penalty for not paying—there were no regulations allowing the utilities to cut off a customer’s power.”
Collecting more money in a corrupt organization doesn’t means they will automatically get a more effective distribution system.
People wont vote for them if they increased the price by 5x.
Instead, people (especially the poorest) would need to put effort into tracking their own usage - and understanding that an airconditioner uses far more electricity than a phone charger.
see also: squirrel wingsuit.