Bankers, beware! India stares at a power debacle 20 times bigger than Enron

Dragging borrowers to the bankruptcy tribunal won't solve anything. Most assets would sell for scrap value

Enron Corp. is long gone, but the scandal it left behind in India has beguiled the country’s lenders for almost two decades.

However, if the bankers who financed the US energy company’s unviable power plant in Maharashtra state aren’t ruing that 2,000-megawatt debacle any more, it’s only because they’re now staring at a mess 20 times bigger.

India’s total electricity-generation ability is 344,000 megawatts, a 72 per cent increase over six years. The country, notorious for its outages, still doesn’t have a power surplus. But coal-fired plants in the private sector that ran at 84 percent capacity utilization at the