An Indian barber holding a candle, has a haircut for a customer at his shop in Kolkata, India.
A building is seen dark following a power outage in Kolkata, India (AP Photo/Bikas Das)
An Indian man watches as he and others wait inside a stalled train for its services to resume following a power outage in New Delhi, India (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)
Indian stranded passengers wait for train services to resume at a railway station following a power outage in New Delhi, India (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)
Indian stranded passengers wait on a platform and some of them on rail tracks for the train services to resume following a power outage at Sealdah station in Kolkata, India (AP Photo/Bikas Das)
A handwritten notice about power failure is pasted outside a Metro station after Delhi Metro rail services were disrupted following power outage in New Delhi, India (AP Photo/ Manish Swarup)
India’s huge need for electricity is a problem for the planet
By
Annie Gowen
POWER PLAY | Cheap electricity, a changing climateThis is part of a series exploring how the world’s hunger for cheap electricity is complicating efforts to combat climate change.
India’s leaders say that the huge challenge of extending electric service to its citizens means a hard reality — that the country must continue to increase its fossil fuel consumption, at least in the near term, on a path that could mean a threefold increase in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, according to some estimates.
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked climate change with President Obama in September at the United Nations, he was careful to note that he and Obama share “an uncompromising commitment on climate change without affecting our ability to meet the development aspirations of humanity.”
Fossil fuel generation of electricity is the largest single source of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. Yet demand for inexpensive power will rise in a great tide in the decades to come, especially in South Asia and sub-
Saharan Africa, the two regions of the globe with the least access to electricity. All the countries of Africa, taken together, have twice as many people without electricity as India does — 622 million. No country is content with that.
“It’s a matter of shame that 68 years after independence we have not been able to provide a basic amenity like electricity,” Piyush Goyal, India’s minister of state for power, coal and new and renewable energy, said recently.
The Indian government has launched an ambitious project to supply 24-hour power to its towns and villages by 2022 — with plans for miles of new feeder lines, infrastructure upgrades and solar microgrids for the remotest areas.
If India’s carbon emissions continue to rise, by 2040 it will overtake the United States as the world’s second-highest emitter, behind only China, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency.
Yet the Indian government has long argued that the United States and other industrialized nations bear a greater responsibility for the cumulative damage to the environment from carbon emissions than developing nations — with Modi urging “climate justice” and chiding Western nations to change their wasteful ways.
Total carbon dioxide emissions for India were 1.7 tons per capita in 2012, the most recent complete data available, compared with 6.9 tons for China and 16.3 tons for the United States, according to the World Resources Institute. Officials say they are keenly aware of India’s
vulnerability to the impacts of climate change: rising sea levels, drought, flooding and food security.
Yet the government says it must depend on fossil fuels to bring an estimated 30 percent of the population out of extreme poverty.
“We cannot abandon coal,” said Jairam Ramesh, the former environment minister and climate negotiator, and author of the book “
Green Signals: Ecology, Growth, and Democracy in India.” “It would be suicidal on our part to give up on coal for the next 15 to 20 years, at least, given the need.”
‘We are just surviving’
Although 300 million Indians have no access to power, millions more in the country of 1.2 billion people live with spotty supplies of electricity from the country’s unreliable power grid. The grid
failed spectacularly in 2012, plunging more than 600 million people into total blackout.
In the country’s high-tech capital of Bangalore, for example, residents have recently had to endure hours of power outages each day after repairs and a bad monsoon season prevented the state’s hydroelectric and wind power plants from generating enough electricity.
A world in the dark: 1.3 billion people living in developing countries have no electricity VIEW GRAPHIC
A world in the dark: 1.3 billion people living in developing countries have no electricity
Many of the giant IT companies have their own generating systems — Infosys, for example, is building its own solar park — but small businesses and residents in rural and urban areas are suffering, said Harish Hande, the chairman of Selco-India, a social enterprise that provides solar power in Karnataka.
“How do we manage our supply and make sure we put money aside for infrastructure? If you look at the future, it’s what we need,” he said, “but there’s not a single thing that’s moving ahead.”
Estimates show that India’s power woes cost the economy anywhere from 1 to 3 percent of gross domestic product — an impediment to Modi’s hopes to expand the economy and make the country more hospitable to manufacturing, according to Rahul Tongia, a fellow with Brookings India. Electricity demand will increase sevenfold by mid-century
as the population continues to grow, experts say.
Energy access is worse in rural areas. Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, has a population of 103 million, nearly a third the size of the United States. Fewer have electricity as the primary source of lighting there than in any other place in India, just over 16 percent, according to 2011 census data. Families still light their homes with kerosene lamps and cook on clay stoves with cow-dung patties or kindling.
In Bagwan village, students at the local middle school swelter in concrete classrooms without fans. A diesel generator rattles and spews black smoke outside the offices of the Union Bank of India.
“Electricity touches each and every sector of life,” said Rajesh Kumar Singh, a farmer who is the village sarpanch, akin to a mayor. “I can’t see TV properly. I can purchase an air conditioner, but I can’t run an air conditioner. Every piece of equipment that runs by electricity we can’t have. So life is not good for us. We are just surviving.”
Singh, 44, lives with his large extended family in a spacious home around an open-air courtyard where most of the cooking is done in a clay oven fueled by cow dung. He shows off his small refrigerator, which cannot be used to store food for any length of time because of the uneven electricity supply.
“I have a refrigerator, but it’s just sitting there. It’s just a showpiece,” he said, and sighed. “We are cursed to live in Bihar.”
‘Business as usual’
In Bihar, the average per-capita electricity consumption is 203 kilowatt hours per person per year, compared with about 1,000 kilowatt hours for India as a whole, about 4,000 for China and about 12,000 for the United States, according to estimates from the World Bank and India’s Central Electricity Authority.
Pratyaya Amrit, the secretary of the energy department for Bihar, said that the state is about seven to 10 years behind the rest of the country, a fact that is not lost on his constituents. His office is trying to link the last remaining 2,000 villages with power and improve conditions for 40 percent of the rest that have bad infrastructure.
“They will ask you: ‘My village. By when? Please get it done,’ ” Amrit said.
Indian officials want 100 ‘smart cities.’ Residents just want water and power.]
At the same time, the Indian government says it wants to develop its economy using green technology, setting up
100 smart cities and touting its work with energy efficiency in industrial buildings and making LED light bulbs affordable.
“Two-thirds of our buildings have yet to be built, and half of the roads and infrastructure have yet to be created,” said Samir Saran, a senior fellow and vice president at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “There’s an opportunity to build at least some of them right for the first time — if we can create the right financial ecosystem.”
Rescue plan
In recent months, the Indian government has announced plans to modernize its national grid and is preparing to address the financial woes of the country’s state-owned utility companies, some of which are mired in debt, to the tune of $66 billion. The rescue plan is likely to include power tariff hikes — a politically unpopular concept in a country where many residents are used to heavily subsidized power. In 2010, according to a World Bank estimate, 87 percent of all electricity consumed by domestic customers was subsidized.
In Bihar, 30 percent of power is lost to transmission and distribution as well as theft, Amrit said, although independent analysts say the number may be higher.
Dark comes quickly in Chowkipur village, a small community about two hours from Bihar’s capital of Patna. Parents pull out kerosene lanterns as soon as the sun goes down so their children can study. The young men gather on the grass to play a board game called Ludo, lighting the board with their mobile phones, which they charge for 5 rupees per hour — about 8 cents — in town.
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Indian officials want 100 ‘smart cities.’ Residents just want water and power.
Rama Lakshmi
AJMER, India — Ajmer’s famous 13th-century Sufi shrine draws millions of pilgrims from around the world every year. The city recently launched a new Web site called “
Amazing Ajmer.” But life in this ancient city of 550,000 people in northern India is anything but amazing.
Running water is available for just two hours every two days. Only 130 of 125,000 homes in the city are connected to the sewage system. Dirty water flows in open drains in cramped neighborhoods. Stepwells and lakes have become garbage dumps. Illegal buildings and slums dot the city. And only two traffic lights work.
But soon, Ajmer could be transformed into a 21st-century “smart city” — an urban-planning term for the gleaming metropolises of the future that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to
create by 2022.
These modern marvels would be connected by grids in which water, electricity, waste removal, traffic, hospitals and schools are seamlessly integrated with information technology to run them more efficiently.
The government has set aside $7.5 billion to make it happen, and Modi officially launched the program Thursday. But it’s a grand vision that the residents of Ajmer — one of the 100 cities designated for the modernization — are not quite ready for.
Even as it becomes a
buzzword, many people here are unclear about what it means to be a smart city. And others question whether Modi’s fascination with smart cities in South Korea, China and Abu Dhabi can be duplicated in India.
The ambitious project also signals a marked shift in Indian politics, analysts say. For decades, the village dominated the country’s political and economic decisions, a stubborn legacy that dates to Mahatma Gandhi’s constant refrain that “India lives in its villages.” But now the pace of urbanization is so
rapid that policymakers can no longer look away.
More than 350 million Indians live in cities. According to a McKinsey Global Institute
report, urban expansion will grow in the next few years “at a speed quite unlike anything India has seen before.” By 2030, more than 600 million Indians will live in crowded cities crumbling with
creakyinfrastructure.
In a radical departure from the previous government’s rural focus in the past decade, Modi wants to boost cities as engines of economic growth. By 2030, officials say, 70 percent of India’s economic output is expected to come from the cities.
“Cities in the past were built on riverbanks. They are now built along highways. But in the future, they will be built based on availability of optical-fiber networks and next-generation infrastructure,” Modi
said last year, shortly after taking office.
In the past eight years, the smart-cities rubric has become fashionable among global urban planners who want to use digital technology and big data to create surveillance-heavy intelligent systems that control how people live, consume energy, go to work, and stay healthy and safe.
India’s program involves radical renovation of deteriorating cities as well as constructing new municipalities from scratch, similar to a Wall Street-like financial
hub called the GIFT city in Modi’s home state of Gujarat — where the
progress is nowhere near its promised hype.
When Modi and President Obama met in Washington in September, U.S. companies selected three Indian cities, including Ajmer, to become smart cities. Last month, IBM, Oracle and several other companies met officials in Ajmer to discuss using smart technology to solve some of the city’s challenging water, traffic and waste problems.
“While we are trying to bring 21st-century technology, we also need to sort out some 19th-century challenges in Ajmer,” said Mukesh Aghi, president of the U.S.-India Business Council, which organized the meeting. “Basic services like sanitation, health, roads and electricity have not kept up with the pace of growth in these old cities. We can leverage smart technology to leapfrog some of these problems.”
Aghi said that the U.S. companies are considering a pilot project to install smart electricity meters that will help consumers track consumption and promote conservation on their own.
Ajmer’s residents have already posted a billboard in the heart of town declaring themselves a smart city. But many wonder whether the initiative is just an urban fantasy of technology and real estate companies that is being imposed on Ajmer.
“Can we first work toward becoming a functioning city before aspiring to be a smart city? We lack even the basic services that a city should typically provide,” said Suresh Mathur, a retired schoolteacher who runs a city cleanliness drive called “My Clean School.”
Other critics have dismissed Modi’s smart-cities plan as a 21st-century urban utopia, as a distant Neverland and Orwellian. They say that the idea is more suitable for richer nations whose citizens can afford to take basic urban services such as drinking water, toilets or electricity for granted.
“The Western definition of the smart city is spineless, if not altogether redundant in India — a mere glossing over of civic services and infrastructure,” Gautam Bhatia, an architect and author on urban design, wrote in The Hindu newspaper.
Some worry about damaging or destroying Ajmer’s famous cultural heritage.
“We can’t import a first-world concept of a smart city and plant it here. It has to be culturally appropriate,” said Onkar Singh Lakhawat, chairman of Heritage Preservation and Promotion Authority of Rajasthan.
Officials have held 22 meetings with residents in the past five months to convince them of the merits of the smart-city plan.
“Before you take part in the Olympics, you engage in warm-up exercises, build your stamina, physical fitness and change your attitude,” said Dharmendra Bhatnagar, divisional commissioner. As first steps, his office is arranging a flower show and a photography contest.
The big challenge, Aghi said, is figuring out where the funding for the program will come from. Most city corporations in India are severely cash-strapped. Modi wants Indian and foreign companies to invest in the program, but there is no estimate yet.
One idea is that private companies charge residents a fee to recover their investment. But that could be problematic. Last year, when a private company in Ajmer received a contract to collect and recycle trash, residents protested in the streets and refused to pay.
“There is a mind-set among people that the government should give everything free,” said the city’s mayor, Kamal Bakolia.
In the cramped and labyrinthine lanes leading to Ajmer’s Sufi shrine, there is plenty of chatter and jokes about Ajmer’s new designation. One pilgrim covers his nose with his scarf near an open drain and asks a resident, “When will your city become smart?”
Earlier this year, before Ajmer was chosen for smart-city status, Modi had also included it in a list of 12 “heritage cities” he planned to develop. And a few years ago, the government launched a program to make Ajmer a “slum-free city.”
“Real estate prices have shot up since all this talk of smart city began,” said Syed Munawwar Hussain, the shrine custodian. “We are a world-renowned city, but we are still waiting to become a world-class city.”
...it basically looks like you have to divide your urbanisation rate by 2 to correlate to Indian standards and about by 3 to correlate to Sri Lankan ones @Gibbs @Godman
This is even less than what Bangladesh had in 1971.
@Skies
