New Delhi: Asserting India is a power surplus country, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said there no shortage of coal and dubbed reports in this regard as “absolutely baseless”.
“Absolute baseless! There is no shortage of anything,” Sitharaman said at Harvard Kennedy School in Boston on Tuesday.
“In fact, if I recall the minister's statement, every power-producing installation has the next four days’ stock absolutely available within their own premises and the supply chain has not broken at all,” she added.
When asked by Harvard Professor Lawrence Summers about energy shortage and reports of reduced coal inventories in India, Sitharaman during the conversation organised by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government said “there are not going to be any deficiencies which may lead to any shortfall of supply”.
“So that takes care of India's power situation. We are now a power surplus country. We are also taking fairly good amount of risks to see what the basket of energy is available for India, how much is based on fossil fuel and how much comes from renewable and we are always looking at ways in which it can be shifted in favor of renewable energy,” Sitharaman said.
“So the picture is not of short supply, but it's also picture of newer components into the basket,” she added.
Commenting on the vaccination drive in India against Covid-19 and how has the Indian government managed to come close to administering a billion doses, Sitharaman said India has over the decades steadily built up this institutional arrangement where even down to the village level, primary health centers exist and they take care of basic requirements of the fundamental primary care that has to be given to patients in those areas, PTI reported.
The Finance Minister said these centers have over the years undertaken those inoculations for newborn children which have to be given in a periodic interval India has been very successful in containing the spread of polio.
Sitharaman said that over the years, periodic malaria or seasonal illnesses for which doctors attend to patients in a particular region have given India the capacity to handle large epidemic-proportion illnesses and to treat them.
“Just as soon as the vaccines became available, our systems were ready to fan out, even go to some of the far-flung areas, and give the doses to the people. So, institutional arrangement in India has always been the framework which has been built over the years,” she said.
Stating the question regarding the vaccines was if they had to be preserved in a certain temperature to be carried around and distributed across India, Sitharaman said luckily the two vaccinations which we have used are quite amenable to the Indian conditions.
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“Therefore, the logistics required for moving this from one place to another did not pose quite a challenge and, therefore, we have been successful,” she added.
The Finance Minister further said India has, through some of the bilateral arrangements with countries, been giving vaccines for free.