1 POWER-HUNGRY: The state and the troubled transition in Indian electricity Elizabeth Chatterjee 1 1. INTRODUCTION India’s pre-liberalization power policy was characterized by vast subsidies for irrigated agriculture, widespread theft, scarcity, and underinvestment. With regional variations, this description also fits the contemporary power sector. Electricity is critical for capital accumulation – making its comparative neglect in the study of development all the more egregious – and we would intuitively expect India’s contemporary pro-business state to alter policy to benefit ‘India Inc’. The power sector was indeed one of the first selected for reform in 1991, yet the pro-business policy transition has substantially failed. What can this failure tell us about the contemporary Indian state and its relationship with capitalist development? The following review of public policymaking in the power sector analyses this question along two dimensions: the state’s relations with social classes, and its internal organization. These arise out of the interrelated Marxist and Weberian literatures on the state. To bowdlerize a set of complex debates, Marxists broadly analyse the state in contemporary capitalist society as shaped by class relations, whether through external constraints or internal institutionalization, while Weberians draw greater attention to the state’s own interests and distinctive logic. Nonetheless, moderate Weberian institutionalists are not unsympathetic to class-analytic theories of the state. The modern state – which is not simply despotic and extractive, but aims to coordinate social life – draws upon sources of social power: it is embedded. Even 1 I am very grateful to Barbara Harriss-White, Judith Heyer, and especially the late Jos Mooij for comments on drafts of this chapter.