Publisher's Synopsis
The history of electricity in India traces an inverted arc - like a smiley - which starts in the colonial period with private electricity capacity leading, regresses to a mode of near complete public sector monopoly by the 1980s and then traces the upward incline to a near 50% share for private electricity suppliers - not a full smiley but a slightly lop-sided one. The half-smile - like Mona Lisa's - masks long periods of misallocation of public capital, unabashed populism, and careless adherence to 'path dependencies' which plagues bureaucracies the world over.
