No shortage of anything: FM

Boston: Amid reports of the ongoing coal shortage in the country, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stressed that there is no shortage and termed these as 'absolutely baseless', saying India is a power surplus country. Sitharaman said that Power Minister R K Singh went on record just two days ago when he said absolutely baseless information is floating around that there is probably shortage of coal, shortage of other inventories which will lead to a sudden gap in the supply demand situation in the energy consumption.

"Absolute baseless! There is no shortage of anything. 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," Sitharaman said here at Harvard Kennedy School on Tuesday. During the conversation organised by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Sitharaman was asked by Harvard Professor Lawrence Summers about energy shortage and reports of reduced coal inventories in India.

"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. So the picture is not of short supply, but it's also picture of newer components into the basket," she said.

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 over the decades, India has 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. "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," she said. Further, she stated 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.