A cat-and-mouse game of electricity theft unfolds in Kanpur, India, a city that once prided itself as \u201cthe Manchester of the East\u201d for its many factories, but now many of its three million people cannot afford their power bills. Desperate times call for desperate measures and that means outlaw electricians like Loha Singh risk life and limb to connect the disconnected.<\/p>\n
Loha seems to have the magic talent to decipher and handle the tangled sea of live wires but this is dangerous business involving potentially explosive transformers.<\/p>\n
He has to literally hold his breath at times to protect himself from electrocution. A hero to many locals but a scourge to the power company, is Loha a modern day Robin Hood, or is he making matters worse by taking the law \u2014 and power \u2014 into his own hands?<\/p>\n
To Loha and many other frustrated locals, the real enemy is Ritu Maheshwari, the first female chief of the Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCO). But she sees herself as on a mission to eliminate powerlessness. Electricity theft accounts for nearly 30 percent of all losses to KESCO, aggravating the crisis, and she has constituted a new task force to tackle the problem.<\/p>\n
In Powerless<\/i>, we see the power company\u2019s attempts to disconnect the countless illegal connections that Loha and others like him have installed. And in truth, they agree on at least one thing: both point out that it isn\u2019t just the poor, but also the rich who steal electricity. \u201cHow much can the government subsidize?” she asks.<\/p>\n
With the hot Indian summer settling in and temperatures reaching 113 degrees, the electricity problem takes on crisis proportions, with dire implications on the citizen\u2019s lives and livelihoods. Tensions mount as more and more of the city suffers through prolonged outages, as more people and businesses sit in darkness, while KESCO line workers fear for their physical safety due to the angry mobs surrounding them.<\/p>\n
One business owner says just having 24 straight hours of electricity, something we take for granted in the USA, would make his business flourish. Powerless<\/i> provides no easy answers, but is a tense portrayal of a once-thriving city on the brink of chaos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Kanpur, India, a city with 15-hour power outages, an outlaw electrician provides Robin Hood-style services to the poor. Meanwhile, the first female chief of the electricity utility company is on a mission to dismantle the illegal connections for good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":8353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1225],"class_list":["post-312","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-politics-and-government"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n