br>An internal State Department memo is surprisingly frank in its assessment of the Y2K problems faced by India, the world's second most populous nation.

While the memo is unclassified, it obviously was not intended for publication, which explains the directness of its message. The memo was prepared by the American Embassy in New Delhi and addressed to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Washington, D.C.

As is common with such documents, the authors open and close with meaningless statements that put the best possible light on the situation. It's what you read in between those happy faces that makes this memo exceptional.

The opening summary begins, for example, with assurances that "Y2K awareness is high in India, and the country has made some real progress in the last six months in reaching Y2K compliance, especially in the critical sectors of banking and finance, civil aviation, and telecommunications."

"But," it quickly adds, "nowhere is the Y2K process complete, and contingency planning has barely begun. Most worrisome is the presently largely unknown vulnerability of the ocean shipping sector and the 70 percent of the electrical power industry that is under the control of the state electricity boards, large parts of which only now are beginning basic inventories and assessments."

That's alarming news, considering that inventory and assessment is the easiest part of the Y2K-proofing process. For entities as large as these Indian power companies, it takes years to do the remediation work, much less testing -- and there are less than 200 days left before Y2K hits.

This is alarming news, too, because India is a vitally important nation on the world stage, even if this is often forgotten in Washington. Right now its importance is readily conceded, given the possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. For all its poverty, India has a sizable body of highly trained and competent technicians, some of whom have been welcomed into the U.S. to help us with our Y2K remediation. And it is huge, with roughly a billion people, and is expected to push past China by 2050 to become the world's most populous nation.

In that most critical power sector, there is a stark contrast between the status of the private and government-run systems.

On the private side, "The National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), which supplies about 25 percent of the nation's electric power (mostly in the north of the country), has implemented a thorough Y2K program, which is now nearing completion in most respects," reports the memo.

"Unfortunately," the memo continues, "the records of the SEBs (the State Electricity Boards), which together supply 70 percent of the nation's electric power, is much weaker. Some SEBs, 'especially those in the central and east of the country,' according to (S.C.) Gupta (senior technical advisor at the government's National Informatics Center), are only now beginning the basic inventories of equipment and assessment of the Y2K risk. NIC worries that power failures, even in small states, could shut down large chunks of the chronically power-short national grid."

Later the memo states that "while many companies in critical sectors with sensitive equipment, large hotels, and government and diplomatic organizations have limited backup generation capacity, this total backup probably amounts to only 5-10 percent of India's total electric generating capacity nationwide."

The memo states that "with rapidly diminishing time until the new millennium, NIC is switching its emphasis to audits of compliance measures already taken and contingency planning, which is almost wholly lacking even in the most progressive Y2K sectors of the Indian economy."

"In private industry," says the memo, "CII (the Confederation of Indian Industry) has found essentially three present levels of Y2K readiness: large conglomerates like Hindustan Levers and TATA that are reaching full compliance, smaller companies that are now working through Y2K programs, and other smaller companies, perhaps 30 to 40 percent of the total industrial sector (emphasis added), that have yet to address the Y2K problem at all."

The memo relays relatively good news about some sectors of the economy, but notes that "the Y2K coordinators that the embassy contacted can all talk the talk. The question is whether they can walk the walk. The few details that most coordinators provide about the specifics of their programs have made it impossible to make an independent assessment of India's likely Y2K readiness."

After a message like this, one can only appreciate the sardonic but diplomatically restrained concluding sentence: "We would not be surprised to see some pretty annoying glitches here and there throughout the economy."

From Worldnetdaily.com

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), July 15, 1999

Answers

Based on the evidence, I see no reason why the lights won't go out in the U.S. -- maybe permanently. I don't expect that to actually happen, but as of today, July 15, 1999, I don't see any reason why it will not. The effect of Y2K on the electric utilities, their suppliers, and the power grid itself is a huge unknown at this late date.

And I suspect that the people of India will have a far better time managing without electricity than people here in the U.S.

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.net), July 15, 1999.

Wow. I didn't even know they HAD electricity in India.

-- welcome to (the@dark.ages), July 15, 1999.

I don't know if your answer was tongue-in-cheek or not, but it does remind of a point that I'd like to make. Many of us seem to think that other than Europe and Japan, the rest of the world is populated by peasants who are already living a self-sufficient lifestyle.

While third world countries have their share of peasants, they also have governments, banks, airports, and, yes, electricity. They have citizens who are just as dependent on their national infrastructures as we are. Many of them have a thriving export market, often with us a major trading partner.

So what happens overseas is important from both a humanitarian standpoint as well as an economic one.

End of sermon.

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), July 15, 1999.