Paper by Shantanu Dixit and Girish Sant in  Economic and Political Weekly, April 12, 1997.Huge subsidy and growing agricultural consumption is a highly political issue critical for regaining the financial health of the state power sector. This short paper points the serious lacunae and inconsistencies in the power use data available with the government agencies, such as data on the number of wells in the state and number of irrigation pumps on wells. This paper is an outcome of work on IPS subsidies wherein the authors stumbled on serious discrepancies in official data required to analyse crucial issues such as: who really benefits from IPS subsidy? and what will be the impact of tariff rationalisation?