Rural electrification of Vietnam was not part of my plan when I started working in that country. It was one of those chance issues that creep into one’s life unbeknown and unsought, but soon take over one’s total life’s concentration. So it was with projects that would provide power to the rural people of Vietnam. Little did I realize when I accepted the challenge that it would turn out to be one of the most satisfying aspects of my stay in Vietnam. And it had all come by happenstance.
A new World Bank country director, Andrew Steer, young and ambitious, had just taken over in 1997 and he had set about expanding the office with a vengeance, just as the Bank moved to implement its new decentralization policies. This move of senior staff to the country offices and the transfer of responsibility to the country directors were to see one of its earliest tussles in Vietnam and that in the energy sector. Our energy department was planning to finance a hydropower plant, but Steer’s background was in the environmental department and he was adamantly opposed to it. In a tense confrontation with the energy director, he refused to provide financial support for energy staff to proceed further. He argued that I had persuaded the Japanese aid agency to step in with the necessary funds for the hydropower plant and that the Bank funds could be better used on other projects for the alleviation of poverty, like rural electrification.
Steer then asked me if I would design and implement a rural electrification project. I had never worked on problems of rural electrification, but reluctantly agreed to lead the effort since I was in the field hoping that I could persuade someone from Washington with much greater knowledge in the area to help me, if not to lead, the effort. To my surprise, I found that the Bank had little expertise left in this area over the years as most staff had retired and their replacements had focused on the sexier areas of privatization and reform. Unfortunately, I was by then persona non grata with our energy department back in Washington as the blame for the loss of this hydropower project was laid squarely at my door, although it was the country director who made these decisions and not me. So even the modicum of technical assistance that one might expect was not readily forthcoming. I was left to my own devices. It was generally expected that this rural electrification project would die on the vine. But I was determined to learn all I could about rural electrification, and I delved enthusiastically into all old Bank studies and projects. Among the first ones I studied was a project in the Philippines where the Bank had been a presence for the past two decades.
The Philippines had over 132 rural electricity cooperatives of which less than 15% operated efficiently or even broke even. On a proposed mission to develop a rural electrification policy paper, we planned to visit some of the weak cooperatives as well as those that had sustained a profitable operation over a number of years. We learned of three cooperatives on the island of Cebu, which had demonstrated superior performance over a number of years. Our mission flew down from Manila to Cebu to visit the general manager of these cooperatives. As our team entered the conference room of Francisco Silva, the general manager of the three cooperatives in Cebu, we were surrounded and serenaded by staff wearing colorful costumes. We introduced ourselves and explained the objectives of our visit. Fr. Silva held up his hand and directed his staff to sing another song for us. After the song was over, we told him that we were really keen to understand how he had been able to maintain an extremely efficient operation in the rural electricity cooperatives that he managed. Once again, instead of answering our question, he urged his staff to sing a rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful Day”! By now, our team was a trifle bemused. Seeing that we were getting a bit restive, he turned and explained that only the previous month he had hosted a team from the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) who had asked him exactly the same question. He told us what he had told them.
“Look, I have no management degrees or training and so cannot tell you what my techniques are. But you are welcome to send a team to stay with me and observe directly.”
So AIM sent a team to Cebu to do a case study. They stayed for a few weeks with his rural cooperative, observing his methods of management. But at the end of their visit, they came to him and said,” Father Silva, we cannot write a case study because you seem to be doing everything contrary to normal management techniques!”
But we persisted in our question, “You run a very successful rural electricity cooperative (REC) so what did the AIM team miss in their evaluation?”
His reply was interesting. He said, “The AIM team did not understand that successful management must be rooted in the culture of the country.”
Asked to explain what that meant in concrete terms, he replied, “Look, when you walked in, my staff sang a few songs and you were all a little confused. But you need to realize that people in the Philippines love to sing and that it is deeply embedded in their culture.”
“So?” we asked in confusion. “What has that got do with management?”
“Everything,” he replied. “A few years ago, the RECs under my charge had very high losses. So I announced that if the staffs of the REC that could not reduce their losses from 20% to 10% would not be allowed to sing in the annual competition! The results: one of the REC brought down losses to 10% within six months. The others did not and so were not allowed to participate in the singing competition the next year. As a result, now all the RECs have losses within acceptable limits. ”
Until recently, Father Silva’s cooperative staff had to chase after the rural households to collect the bills, but he had changed that by announcing that the cooperative would sit for two days in every village for the collections. If the households did not pay, they would have to travel ten miles to the nearest town office to pay and if the payments were still not received, their electricity would be cut off. Now, when the day approached for the payment of electricity bills, all the households in the village went to each other to ensure that they all had the necessary funds or to borrow them if they did not. His cooperative had a collection efficiency of over 90% and so clearly the approach had paid off. “But,” he said, “underlying all this is an understanding of local culture and norms.”
I remembered this lesson from Father Silva and was determined that before we designed the project in Vietnam, our team would visit the villages firsthand to learn from them. That year, we laid out an aggressive program of field visits – every week we would visit a different commune in a different province. During the next year, we visited 30 provinces and over 100 communes, talking to rural households and commune leaders as well as the provincial leadership. We wanted to know what they were willing to pay, what they would use the electricity for, how they wanted the cooperative to be managed etc. These visits became the highlight of my stay in Vietnam. I visited areas that most expatriates had not even heard of and began to learn of the real Vietnam in the rural areas.
These visits became a voyage of discovery. Each commune we traveled to had a different story to tell and a different lesson to teach us. But as we visited these communes – from Vietnam’s northern borders to the southern mangrove swamps, from the fishing communities in the east to the poorest Hmong communes in the central highlands- one thing remained common. The commune office where we were received was almost always a brick room, with either a bust of Ho Chi Minh or a large painting of him. There would be a few cupboards in the room with a few circulars and books. Some of the wealthier communes also had a TV set that was used for the village meetings in the evenings. The secretary of the commune Peoples Committee invariably accompanied the head of the commune, who always came armed with a children’s exercise book in which he noted down all our questions and from which he produced the data regarding his commune.
During these visits, we were to meet some of the most interesting people in the country – a vivacious chairwoman of a PPC in the north who told me that she had shut down all the beer parlors in the cities of her province as one of her first acts to make sure that all men went home after work; another PPC chairman who wanted to make sure that all the communes in his province were electrified and that his own birthplace commune would be the last to be given power; the leader of the women’s artillery corps in the American War who had returned to fishing and whose commune the country had forgotten almost for two decades. There was also an English teacher who had never before met a foreigner and had never heard English spoken before we met him; the chief of a village who would talk only after we had shared rice wine with him from the communal gourd; Joseph, the priest who had been confined to his parish for two years but was not permitted to talk to his parishioners. And then there was the Thai general secretary of Dien Bien Phu province who cheerfully told us that he had five children and was exempt from the national laws on two children because he was from a minority community group, and who then wanted to honor me with a rice bottle laced with the bile of a live bear; the young man in Pac Bo who was so smitten with my wife, who often accompanied me in these sojourns, that he kept wanting to beat me in table tennis while Ena looked on. And also the consternation of Ranjit Lamech from the World Bank, who wanted to set up a dual accounting system in the villages only to find that there was not even a bank in close vicinity and that all finances were kept in a steel trunk in the schoolhouse!
In the north, we went up to the Chinese border and visited the secret hideout of Ho Chi Minh in Pac Bo. In the west, we went onto the Laotian border where the villages were reputed to be the centre of drug running from Myanmar and Thailand. In the central highlands, we visited some of the poorest villages among the Hmong and sipped wine from their communal gourds. It was to be learning experience the likes of which I had never had. While we were planning and designing the rural energy project, we were also learning real lessons from our travels. All these formed a kaleidoscope of our journeys, but they all added up to a picture of a country restless and on the move and wanting to do things
The conventional wisdom on extending electricity access to the rural areas, particularly the poorer ones, was that the biggest constraint was the high connection charges levied by the power companies. The Bank’s “best practices” paper recommends that for increasing rural access, some method needed to be found to reduce the initial connection charges for poorer customers, or there needed to be some availability of credit to spread these costs over some years. In a number of communes that we visited in Vietnam, the situation was somewhat different. Binh Phu commune in Tra Vinh province was a typical commune. It had 2927 households, 40% of these were electrified with an average consumption of only 20 – 30 kWh/month/household. From the total electricity consumption in the commune, 80% was for household uses, 15% for services and 5% for production uses. Each household paid VND 500,000 for the cost of setting up the service to the house while the monthly payments per household was about 20-25,000 VND (approximately US $1-$1.5). When asked why more households were not connecting to the existing grid, the answer was a little surprising. The villagers said that they had difficulty in paying the monthly bills with an annual income of only 2 million VND. When asked whether the high connection charges of 0.5 million VND was a major barrier, their reply was that they could afford to pay the initial connection charges. When asked for clarification, the answer came. “Oh! We can pay for the initial connection charge easily by selling a piglet. It is the monthly dues that are a problem! You city people,” he added, “don’t realize that we don’t get monthly wages in the field, but have money in our pockets only when the harvest comes in.”
The prompt collection of power bills from customers in the rural areas has always proven to be a major issue in rural electrification projects around the world. Thus, the ones that were able to successfully tackle these issues elicited particular interest. There were two cases where the managers of the rural cooperatives had solved this problem, each in his own unique way.
The Dai Hai Private Agency was an organization for rural electrification in the southern province of Soc Trang established in 1992 by Mr. Nguyen Duc Thanh, a former teacher. The Agency served about 4,400 households in five communes. The total asset of the agency were estimated VND 4 billion with electricity sales of 200,000 kWh/month. The price for electricity was VND 650 to 700/kWh for residential use where the average annual income was about 2 million dongs. For connecting to the Agency’s network, a household paid a onetime connection fee of VND 900,000 and signed a contract with the Agency, in which the tariff was specified. The Agency was fully responsible for the maintenance and repair of the network. The Agency, with 15 staff, was running like a small business enterprise and paid profit tax and VAT of 10%. One of the reasons for its success had been its ability to collect payments for all the electricity sold from all of its customers. When I enquired what the average collection ratio was, Mr. Than told me that in the initial stages, a number of customers delayed paying their bills citing their financial difficulties, but now the collections were a hundred percent. When asked how this was achieved, he said the solution was quite simple - he requested the village priest to read out the names of the defaulters after each monthly mass in the church! Fr Silva in the Philippines had followed a different road by transferring the responsibility squarely on to the consumers.
Another prevalent view in the Bank was that most villagers were too poor to pay the high power tariffs that generally needed to be levied to even recover basic operational costs. A similar issue had also been raised in the poorer villages of the Philippines. Father Silva had recounted that during his visits to these villages; he would summon the family and ask them if they wanted electricity. And the answer inevitably was yes, but that they could not afford to pay the monthly dues of about 100- 150 pesos. Whereupon he would ask the head of the household how many beers he drank in a week. The answer would come, “Oh Father! I drink only one can a day.” And each can of beer cost? About 10 pesos. “OK,” Father Silva would reply, “only drink every alternate day and put that money in an empty can every week. By the end of the month, you will have enough money for electricity for your family!”
The one problem that has dogged all efforts at rural electrification has been how to use it for productive uses. Once power came to the village and the households turned to TV programs for education and entertainment, they realized that perhaps there were other uses possible, which could bring in additional income. The productive use of electricity in the rural areas has always been hard to document. So the results of electrification of a rural area in Central Vietnam that led to a major economic improvement provided an interesting example.
Duy Son 2 in Quang Nam province had a cooperative, but had no electricity despite its proximity to the Chop Xoi Mountains and various water streams. In 1984, with the initiative of the head of the cooperative, Mr. Lui Ban, a 400 kw/hour turbine of the Duy Son 2 hydroelectric plant was finally installed in 1984. The capacity of the power plant was further increased to almost 1200 kw/hour by 1990. There were 2800 households in the cooperative and all were now electrified with an average income of 560 kilograms of rice per year. By 1995, the power plant had a turnover of over 1 billion VND per year and it supplied water to enable two to three rice crops per year. Rice production increased from 1946 tonnes in 1984 to 3560 tonnes in 1996. A garment workshop set up by the cooperative employed 250 female workers coming from the adjacent farming families working in two shifts a day. Some of their products were now exported to neighboring East Asian countries. Seeing the success of the garment workshop, the cooperative bought 20 weaving looms and provided loans to members for another 80 looms, set up a rattan workshop employing 120 workers and also a shoe/heel production unit employing 70 workers. In 1996, the cooperative made a profit of about 200 million VND and its fixed asset value has increased to 8.6 billion VND. As a result of his efforts, Mr. Luu Ban, the former head of the cooperative and the man who had dreamed of harnessing the waters for electricity, was awarded the title of “Labor Hero” by the government.
Over the next year, Hung, my operations officer, and I traveled the width and breadth of the country visiting different provinces and talking to commune leadership about what they wanted. One of these visits was to Dien Bien Phu, location of the famous battle that my father had talked about almost forty years ago. During my Berkeley days, the French defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese in this valley was a constant subject of debate as the possibility of the Americans meeting the same fate was discussed. We rode in a Land Rover and spent a few days in Dien Bien Phu reliving the war and visiting the various hillocks that the French general had named after his mistresses, and which had been gradually run over by the Vietnamese forces. We saw the guns that the Vietnamese had laboriously pushed by hand to the top of the surrounding mountains undetected by the French and which had contributed to their final defeat. When we returned to Hanoi, I was at a party hosted by the Indian ambassador, Aftab Seth. When he heard of my visit to Dien Bien Phu, he took me by the hand and said, “I want you to meet the hero of that battle – General Giap.” General Giap was a slight man then in his eighties and very interested in what I had seen. “Next time,” he told me, “you must visit my jungle headquarters from where we directed the battle.” Which I did on a later date and it was to be one of the highlights of my peregrinations in rural Vietnam.
In our visits to the rural areas, a few staff from the national power utility, EVN, often accompanied us. In the early days, most of EVN staff treated these visits with disdain. Rural electrification was a loss maker in the national utility and the more ambitious staff were all busy building new power plants. But then in 1999, things changed. There was a minor rebellion in a commune in northern Vietnam where the villagers had rounded on the communist party officials for their corruption and rent seeking. Word of this slowly leaked to the outside world. The Party officials in Hanoi were grim faced to find that the rebellion had occurred in exactly the same villages where their own revolution had started some decades back. The grievances were the same: rural areas were neglected, promises made were not kept after the elections and ruthless and corrupt officials from the provinces looted the poor. The Party was sufficiently shook up by this development to order a swift reordering of priorities: the rural areas were to be given priority and their demand for electricity, water and medical facilities were to be met on a time bound plan.
The senior management of both EVN and the Ministry of Industry were delighted to inform the Party of their negotiations with the World Bank for a $150 million rural energy project, which would provide electricity to over 700 communes in the country. All of a sudden, our field visits started resembling wedding caravans as more and more senior utility staff joined in our discussions with the rural people. Many of these Hanoi or Danang based staff had never visited any of the rural areas, certainly never having examined in any depth their problems or what could be done about them. For many of them, all of this was a revelation, and they learnt more about their own country with some surprise. There was, however, a young man, Lien, that we met in our travels in central Vietnam. Tall, lanky, bespectacled and intense, he was extremely distrustful of the Bank and was candid in his opinion that the Bank would never finance rural electrification. He had been working on problems of rural electrification for several years and was getting progressively discouraged at the lack of progress his country was making. He was skeptical of what we were trying to achieve, but he was extremely knowledgeable. Soon, I made him our internal Rosetta Stone – testing out our theories with him for their practicality.
By 1998, all these visits and discussions had gradually led us to develop our own model of rural electrification in the Vietnamese context. We all agreed that there would be no give away and that the rural households had to contribute not only to the capital cost of the development, but also in its operation and management. Having formulated the fundamental guidelines for the development of rural electrification in Vietnam, the Bank invited all the communes to participate in the project. To do so, however, they had to agree formally to certain fundamental principles. The choice was theirs, there was to be no compulsion, but every commune and provincial leadership had to provide a letter stating their willingness to abide by these conditions. These were: (a) all investments in the rural electrification project were to be economically viable; (b) there would be cost sharing between all the parties including the consumers, local governments, the national government and the World Bank; (c) the construction would be based on the most cost effective technology; (d) consumers would commit to connect to the network and agree to pay operating charges; (e) there would be no operating subsidies; (f) the local distribution utility would have a legal status with financial controls and (g) the community would accept the responsibility of managing the operations after the completion of construction. In effect, each rural household would have to pay about $20 for the capital costs and about $2 a month for the electricity they utilized. In most communes, more than two thirds of the households agreed to pay the connection charges. The provincial government would provide the land free while the national government would borrow from the Bank at low interest rates. All construction had to follow national specifications and after the completion of the construction, its operation and management would be transferred to the commune electricity cooperative.
We circulated these fundamental principles to the over 2000 communes that had expressed an interest in joining the Bank project and to make them aware of the low interest credit that we would provide. Over 1000 communes replied and the Ministry of Industry selected 670 communes to participate in the first part of the project. On this basis, the Bank agreed to provide to the ministry a loan of $150 million. Vietnam signed the loan in mid-2000 and construction work began soon thereafter to provide electricity to about 2 million people.
Vietnam’s first rural energy project progressed with great speed and by the end of 2004, it had connected over 900 communes to the national grid, thus providing electricity to over half a million new households. Not only were these rural households provided electricity in a short period of time, EVN and the Power companies also followed a strategy that provided for local people to participate in the construction and operation of the new systems. The construction contracts were designed to maximize local contracting industry participation even though it meant awarding and supervising over 600 contracts. These small construction contracts created major employment potential and became the foundation of an efficient local construction industry in the districts. After the completion of construction, it was agreed that the communes would help to manage the operation and maintenance of the local distribution grids. The power companies trained a large number of people from the communes, who then became service agents responsible for routine operations and maintenance, as well as commercial activities such as billing and collection. In most communes, two or three persons had by now been trained to perform this function. Thus, the project not only provided electricity to the communes, it also laid the foundation for local employment and management. It also had some other side effects. Mr. Hai, the Minister of Industry, told me that his election as minister was certainly helped by the fact that a large number of communes in his area had received electricity and that he had come to be known in the area as one who could really get things done.
One of the unanswered questions of rural electrification is to what extent it really helps economic development. We needed to measure this with some accuracy and so commissioned a five-year research project with the Institute of Sociology in Hanoi. But even before that, I undertook a travel program to see what I could find empirically on my visits. All I can say is that in my travels, the evidence of the impact of rural electrification on the local economy was tremendous.
One of the first communes to be electrified was the “hero” commune of Ngu Thuy in Le Thuy district of Quang Binh province in central Vietnam. There, I met with the women of the artillery corps who had fought in the American War and had sunk several US ships. Tran Thi Hoanh had been the leader of the group then. She was now a fisherwoman. She gravely told me of the benefits that electricity would bring to her commune and how she looked forward to buying a small icebox to preserve her catch of fish before taking it to the market some fifteen kilometers away. When I visited the same commune two years later, the chairman of the commune, Nguyen Phuong Lam, told me that all of the 521 households in the commune now had electricity. The consumption of electricity had grown from a mere 100,000 kwhrs in 2002 to over 14,000 kwhrs/month in 2004. Two ice making enterprises had been set up and there was one company exploring for titanium in the area. The average household income had increased from 88,000 VND in 2002 to well over 130,000 VND today. He proudly went on to say that almost 95% of the households had TVs, while 70% also had rice cookers. Almost 80% of the households now had pumped water for drinking and for their gardens. This fishing village -- almost 70% of the households were involved in fishing while the rest were farmers- had grown prosperous with the coming of electric power and the building of a rural road that connected them to the nearest district town. Even the TV had played a major part in that it provided them with information regarding technical matters for both the farmers and the fishermen.
I was curious to see what had happened to Tran Thi Hoanh who I recalled had seemed such a shy and unlikely leader of a women’s battalion. We went in search of her in the neighboring village of Ngu Thuy. Her husband greeted us and showed us the photograph we had taken on that day two years ago. I recognized her in the photograph, but wondered if she would remember the foreigner who had showed up one day two years ago at her village to switch on the power in her commune. Hoanh was busy organizing the women in the village, but consented to leave the meeting to come and meet with us. She walked in and greeted us exclaiming that indeed she remembered me from me from that past visit. Over tea I asked her if her life had changed since electricity came to her village and whether she had bought the ice box she told me she planned to buy. She smiled and said that life in the village was now much better and that she was busy organizing the women in her commune. But, no, she had not bought the ice box....
Another commune I visited was in Binh Son district in Quang Ngai province where electricity came only in 2002. The Vice Chairman of the Peoples Committee indicated that the per capita income of the people in the commune had doubled in the last two years increasing from 200,000 VND/month (approximately US $13) to over 400,000 VND. I visited some of the over 30 households in the commune that had started new enterprises with the coming of good quality power. These included woodworking workshops, motorcycle repairs shops, sewing machines, pumping etc. It was clear that electrification had improved life in the commune.
I was pleased that we were having an impact in rural Vietnam. The word of the success of this project spread far and wide. We had managed to provide electricity to one new commune every day for the past three years!
The success of this project led to intense pressure from the government to expand the program to solve the remaining problems of rural electrification in the country. In December of 2003, we started work on the second rural energy project. But the second rural energy project had to tackle a much more difficult problem, that of the rehabilitation of the existing poor electricity grids in the rural areas. There were not only technical issues involved in the repair and rehabilitation of old systems; there were also issues of diversified ownership and forms of management.
In the past decade, about 6,918 rural communes out of the 8,891 communes in the country were connected under the previous programs of the Government. In this approach, EVN had provided a connection to the center of the commune, but the local community, households and provincial governments had to take the responsibility of mobilizing funds, purchasing and installation of the low-voltage grid, and for its management. While this program had been successful in connecting over 6,000 communes, it also was the genesis of the problems we faced. These low voltage grids in general were poorly designed and constructed, leading to heavy losses varying from 20 to 50 percent in some cases. Since the local grid purchased power at a government fixed price at the center of the commune, the cost of these losses had to be recovered from the consumers in the commune, leading to high power prices ranging from VND1,000 to VND2,000/kWh (almost two to three times the nationally prescribed residential tariffs).
The local Commune Electricity groups that were formed to manage the grids had neither legal status nor any financial accountability or controls. In most communes, these groups were unable to find the investments needed for network expansion since they could not raise any bank funds and local equity was limited. When these grids were in disrepair, there were often no funds for rehabilitation, and in some cases, even for routine operation and maintenance. Also, since the households in the community were required to contribute to the construction of the local low-voltage grids, only the richer households had access to electricity. In many of these communes, thus, less than 50 percent of the households had access and those that did paid much higher tariffs than their urban counterparts.
The second rural energy project was designed to help the government solve these problems. It would help the local people to take over the management of the local grids through the creation of rural electricity cooperatives or district level joint stock companies. The joint stock companies would be run as businesses and provide additional employment in the rural areas. While this was a pilot project, if it was successful, it would revolutionize the distribution network in the entire country, providing low cost, good quality power to the rural areas for the creation of new enterprises and thus provide employment opportunities. As the ambitious nature of the project became apparent, there was great resistance from the conventional thinkers in the Bank’s Washington headquarters. Questions were raised and demands made to slow down the processing of the project until further studies could be done. Thus, we had the paradoxical situation of the government wanting to proceed with full speed, while our professional colleagues were reluctant to sign off on the project. This tussle became bitter and I was asked to stay on in Vietnam by the country director to smooth the waters and to ensure that the Bank board approved the project. The Bank board finally approved the $200 million project in November 2004.
Vietnam became one of the leading countries in the world to have provided electricity to over 90% of its total population. It had gone from only 50% coverage of households in 1996 to 90% in 2004. As I saw the success of Vietnam’s rural electrification program, I wondered if it were possible to repeat the success of Vietnam in rural electrification in my own country.
The Bank had provided over one billion dollars since the opening up of Vietnam in 1994. This had made possible a complete reorganization and upgrading of its electricity sector, helped them develop their first offshore gas field and also mobilize the private sector for the financing of new power plants. The changes I had seen since my first arrival in Vietnam almost fourteen years ago were phenomenal. The per capita income of the country had increased three times and was now almost the same as that of India. Hanoi was no longer a quiet quaint village, but a bustling metropolis with over six world class hotels, a gleaming efficient airport, streets lined with shops stocking the latest in electronic and fashion goods, a world class opera house, an art theatre and numerous art galleries selling the captivating works of Vietnamese artists. And we had been a significant part of this development. It is rare to be present at a country’s rebirth and I had been fortunate to be a witness to Vietnam’s transformation from a poor third world economy to a rapidly growing tiger in the east, to soon rival both Thailand and the Philippines. From a country that was reluctant to publish its national budget, it has moved to join the international community by aggressively lobbying to become a part of the World Trade Organization.
In December 2004, I was presented with a medal by the government of Vietnam and EVN for my contribution to the development of the energy sector in Vietnam at a simple but touching ceremony. But even more than this official recognition was a simple gift from one of the power distribution companies. At my farewell reception, Lien presented me with a painting on behalf of his company. It was a beautiful rural landscape and I had merely glanced at it. Then I saw the inscription at the bottom of the painting. It said, “To Dr Anil Malhotra. For helping change the rural landscape of Vietnam.”
