There's a candle stub on the windowsill of nearly every house in Syad Lyngdoh village. Nobody put it there for decoration. It's there because we've learned, the way you learn which step on the stairs is loose, that the light is going to go. Not might. Will. Usually around dinner time, sometimes in the middle of a child's homework, and almost always without a word of explanation from anyone.

For years I told myself this was a village problem - Always. Ri-Bhoi gets what's left over, the interior gets what's left of that, and that's how it's been since before I was old enough to complain. But. lately, friends in Shillong tell me the same story from Laitumkhrah, from Mawlai, from Nongthymmai. The fridge stops, starts, stops. The inverter beeps through the night. A tailor loses half a day's orders; a student in a rented room revises for exams by the light of her phone. The capital, it seems, has caught the village's illness.

And every month, without fail, the bill arrives. It never loses its way. It never suffers a technical fault.

When it rained hard, we blamed the rain, and honestly that was fair. A tree comes down on the line in July, you light the candle, you don't write angry letters. But the heavy rains have eased and the light still goes. The official explanations, meanwhile, keep shifting. In January the Power Minister, Metbah Lyngdoh, told the press, "There is no load shedding in Meghalaya," and said outages came only from repairs and unforeseen faults. By the end of May he was more candid. He admitted to The Shillong Times that shutdowns couldn't be avoided while RDSS and other works went on, offered no date by which they'd end, and asked us to bear the "temporary inconvenience." Months before either statement, MeECL's chairman had told reporters that shutdown notices appear in the newspapers every day.

I read the newspapers. I'm still waiting to find Syad Lyngdoh in one of those notices. (Perhaps I've been reading the wrong page.)

Here's the part that should make every household in this state sit up. Under the tariff MSERC approved for 2026-27, in force since 1 April, a domestic consumer pays a fixed charge of Rs 90 for every kVA of connected load, every month. That's before a single bulb is switched on. A modest house with a two-kVA connection owes Rs 180 a month whether the wire is live or dead. If the transformer burns out on the 3rd and nobody replaces it till the 19th, the fixed charge doesn't notice. It's billed in full.

Gogol understood this arrangement better than our regulators seem to. In his book - Dead Souls, Chichikov travels from estate to estate buying serfs who've died, because on the government's census list they're still alive, and their owners go on paying tax for them until the next count. Paper life, real tax. We've built the modern version: paper supply, real charge. Our connections are alive on MePDCL's ledger and they're billed like it. Whether current actually flows through them is a separate question, and not one the ledger seems to record.

Nor is this the first time that the arithmetic has been on the household.. So- When MSERC revised the tariffs in the middle of 2024, the Highland Post reported that the change would be more lenient towards the industry but a burden to the ordinary domestic consumers..

Now look at who actually carries it. A daily-wage family in Syad Lyngdoh doesn't own an inverter. It has no generator, no second connection, no relative in Shillong whose line comes back sooner. What it has is the bill, and a deadline. Section 56 of the Electricity Act lets a licensee cut supply once fifteen clear days' written notice has gone out on an unpaid bill, and MePDCL exercises that power with remarkable diligence. The lineman nobody can find when the transformer's down finds the house quickly enough when a payment's late. The duty, in practice, runs in one direction.

Premchand has a story about this, set it among wheat fields rather than power lines. In Sava Ser Gehun a poor peasant called Shankar borrows a little more than a ser of wheat from the village priest to feed a wandering holy man. Shankar forgets the loan. The priest does not. A few years later that handful of grain has grown to a debt no wage could clear, Shankar works it off as a bonded labourer, and when he dies his son inherits the debt he owed. Premchand ends by telling his readers almost angrily that he has not made any of it up. I think of Shankar when I see a neighbour counting out notes for the arrears, then the reconnection fee, then next month's fixed charge on a line that sat dead for a week. And where does that neighbour complain? The sub-divisional office, where the phone rings out. The consumer grievance forum, which most people here have never heard of, let alone found. Dostoevsky's Marmeladov, half-drunk in a Petersburg tavern, asks a stranger whether he understands what it means for a man to have nowhere left to turn. In our villages the only office that ever finds its way to your door is the one that sends the bill.

A law, which on paper seemed skewed in the first place, is further tilted by Section 57 of the same Act, which requires a licensee who has failed to meet the standards of performance as specified by the regulator to pay compensation to the affected consumer, as the Commission may determine. The Centre's Electricity (Rights of Consumers) Rules, 2020, however, views round-the-clock supply as a right as against the concession it has as a distribution company. May I ask in all earnestness how many households in Meghalaya have received a single paisa for any outage? I have been in the profession of law long enough to know when a right is there primarily to be invoked.

The Greeks told of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, gave it to people for nothing, and was chained to a rock for his trouble. Meghalaya has quietly rewritten the myth. Here the fire is sold, not given... and it's the buyer who ends up chained.

So, questions galore! None of them are rhetorical, as the answers, for a change, are tucked safely in the archives of Lumjingshai.

How many hours of supply did each of the feeders in Ri-Bhoi and East Khasi Hills actually supply last month, and why is that number not in the public domain at the same time as the bill? If the load shedding is indeed a planned maintenance schedule, where is the detailed breakdown for different localities, and why does it so often omit the specific names of the feeders being affected? The Chief Minister himself had valued the Rs 900 crore project of the RDSS last December; when exactly is it going to be completed, and who will be held responsible if it doesn't happen? Why must families pay for a full month's fixed charge when they have received only half a month's supply, and will the MSERC consider a pro rata adjustment, or even a hearing, on the issue? And finally, is there a single instance in which the MSERC has invoked Section 57 of the Electricity Act against the MePDCL?

Any citizen can raise these questions under the RTI Act. I expect they will be raised. Our grandmothers have a story about darkness as well. When Ka Sngi, the sun, was away in a cave and the world was plunged into darkness, the creatures did not send each other bills for the time they were in the cave. They called a dorbar and debated the matter before sending the rooster to coax her out. Nobody in that tale made the mistake of believing the darkness was a service. I call upon the Government of Meghalaya to show the same degree of basic common sense in raising this issue: bring back the light, and in the meanwhile, stop asking us for rent for the dark.

(The writer is a practising Advocate, Trade Unionist & Ethicist from Ri Bhoi District)

Who Chained Prometheus to the Electricity Meter? A Question for the Government of Meghalaya