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Mining and Jurisprudence: Observations for India’s mining sector to...
Over the past decade, India's mining sector, including the non-fuel mineral sector, has been marred by countless controversies.India 2024: An energised India
Providing affordable and accessible energy to every citizen while ensuring energy security has been the cornerstone of India’s energy policy. Over the years, this policy has been shaped by numerous socio-economic and political factors including the dichotomy between a nationalised Indian energy sector (upstream and downstream) and a more ‘liberated’ economy; centre-state ...100% electrification: Assessing ground reality
The past five years have seen a significant flux in India’s electricity sector. A number of policies have been adopted that have fundamentally transformed the sector. On the upstream side, renewable energy is not a pipe-dream with the sector seeing the fastest growth amongst all other competing energy sources, auction-based processes have ...Some steps towards escalating the ambition on Universal Electricity Access
Whether full household electrification is achieved by March 2019 or later, India’s efforts at electrifying its rural population since the turn of the millennium have received universal recognition. However, several observers have noted that the presence of requisite infrastructure in a village to officially deem it ‘electrified’, or even wire to households ...The future of Indian electricity demand: How much, by whom and under what...
Despite the thrust on transforming electricity supply, India’s per capita electricity consumption remains amongst the lowest in the world, with vast latent demand and high room for efficiency. More recently, electricity demand has witnessed unprecedented slowdown, which is likely a cyclical than a long-term phenomenon. This study aims to deep dive into ...Microgrids in India: Myths, misunderstandings, and the need for proper...
India has a vibrant market for batteries and inverters and even diesel generators – but a cynic could call these responses to the failure of the grid in providing quality supply. Are microgrids similarly stepping in to fill gaps in grid-based supply? This Impact Series Paper revisits the fundamentals and drivers for ...Can the Saubhagya scheme work?
The government’s recently announced 100 per cent household electrification scheme, Saubhagya, aims to tackle the next link for electrification, where until now most efforts focused at the village or hamlet level. The good news is that most villages are now connected to the grid, and remote locations far from the grid are ...Saubhagya programme: The next bold step for electrification – necessary...
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched a new scheme called Saubhagya to ensure electrification of all willing households in the country in rural as well as urban areas by 2019. The focus is on last mile connectivity and poor households would be provided electricity connections free of cost. Is Modi’s new electricity-for-all-homes scheme Saubhagya ...Average rural consumer ends up subsidizing power for urban residents
An article in the Scientific American quotes Brookings India Fellow Rahul Tongia’s research. Rural homes regularly experience rolling blackouts during times of peak demand as utilities move available power to commercial operations and energy-hungry cities. That means the average rural consumer ends up subsidizing power for urban residents by 240 to 510 ...Shaping India’s energy future: Ambitions, actions and obstacles
Multi-domain, multi-scale, and multi-stakeholder efforts are needed to overcome the combination of acute and chronic challenges facing India’s energy future. Analogies aren’t perfect, but a number from the healthcare domain could apply to energy. Doctors often characterize diseases or conditions as acute or chronic – energy faces both sets of challenges. In ...Making India’s Electricity Utilities Viable Enterprises: Economics,...
The Indian electricity system is struggling. Worldwide challenges of supply security, fuel choice, environmental impacts (now adding carbon and climate change), and sustainable business models are present, but the last one is where India is furthest behind. We have a muddled system with state and private participation that satisfies neither the social ...Electrified, but without electricity
No one would believe that simply owning a smartphone would be enough to go online and get connected one would still need a data connection for that to happen. Similarly, it is time that we added a similar level of service to define electrification, a focus area for the government. A decade ...Re-thinking Access and Electrification in India: From Wire to Service
“Electrification” has been a priority for India for many years, and there are ongoing plans and projects to improve access to many more households, followed by electricity for all in the coming years. Despite improvements in the threshold for village electrification (moving from any single point to 10% of homes plus common ...Do rural residential electricity consumers cross-subside their urban...
Santosh Harish and Rahul Tongia examine inequities in supply of household electricity in India, using minute-level data for every feeder across a major utility. Their model and results indicate disparities in load-shedding equate to a welfare transfer, from the rural areas to metropolitan areas or big cities, in the order of thousands ...