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'I dream of a Digital India where government services are easily and efficiently available to citizens on mobile devices,' said Prime Minister Narendra Modi while addressing the Digital India summit about a couple of years back, which has become the basic theme of his 'Digital India' initiative.

It took 17 years for the vision of the then prime minister AB Vajpayee to take the shape of Goods and Services Tax (GST). Finally, the vision is becoming a reality. In fact, by the time you read this, GST might have already come into effect on July 1, 2017.

Three years is not a long time to judge a government's performance, but it is long enough to set a trend in power sector reforms in the country. Narendra Modi's government at the Centre, which completed three-year tenure in the last week of May 2017, has some achievements to boast of in the sector that touches everybody's life.

In India, traditionally, over the years, we tend to measure ourselves more by efforts, rather than on results. While everyone of us is happy practising this policy, no one agency does this better than our governments.

Making electricity available 24x7 to all our countrymen remains a challenge. This challenge has less to do with our generation capacity, and more to do with our transmission and distribution capability.

Our power sector is not exactly firing on all cylinders. The bedrock of this sector, our thermal power plants, which anyway employ most workmen and host most investments, are doing rather badly, reflected in year-to-date plant load factor of only 59 per cent - the lowest in 10 years!

We do live in unusual times, where some of us may be justifiably inclined to call them disruptive times. Technologically, we may be close to achieving disruptions in IoT and AI; but politically, 2016 has been a year of black swans, what with BREXIT, US elections, and back home in India we see the curious case of an economy purportedly growing at the fastest clip in the world, but failing to create jobs.

The whole thing started out on the basic premise of corruption and black money. At least, that is what the hoi polloi were made to believe. Somewhere along the line, the crusade against black money has morphed into a rather arcane campaign for promoting a cashless economy.