The ground-reality that people in the upper economic brackets are immune from the curse of loadshedding as they have by now made alternative arrangements is contributing to raising social tensions in the country. The question whether it is the polity presently in shape to withstand the heavy onslaught of lawlessness that energy crisis tends to breed, only a few would say yes. By now the government approach has been of firefighting, a kind of day-to-day and event-to-event response.
That hasn't worked and the result is before us. The situation as it obtains now calls for an out-of-the-box solution to effectively deal with energy crisis. As a first step the government should accept its failure and the opposition should desist from using it as a political tool against the government. A whole new programme from generation to transmission to the ultimate use of energy has to be evolved and implemented. The challenge is indeed huge refusing to go away any time soon.