Can India's Power Thieves Be Stopped?

To run his fan, lamp, and small television, Sikander strings a homemade wire hook over power cables outside his one-room New Delhi house. "The cables are right there, it's really easy to take it," says Sikander, 26, who uses only one name and earns less than $2 a day cleaning people's ears on the streets of the capital. "You have to be very careful when it rains because you can get electrocuted tying the wires together."

About one-third of the 174 gigawatts of electricity generated in India annually is either stolen by consumers or gets dissipated by the conductors and transmission equipment that form the distribution grid, says Power Secretary P. Uma Shankar. That's more than any other nation, according to a 2010 report by Deloitte analysts. In China the rate was 8 percent. The pilfering of almost enough power to charge California for a year lowers the annual income of Indian distribution companies by $16 billion. It also cuts the country's yearly economic output of $1.3 trillion by 1.2 percent, India's Planning Commission says.