The Centre for Policy Research invites you to a webinar on: Institutional Pathways and Political Economy of 21st Century Electricity in India
This webinar is the eighth in the India Energy Transition Dialogues – a series convened by the Centre for Policy Research to explore different paths to meet India’s 21st century energy goals. Each webinar in this bi-weekly series discusses different pathways proposed by think tanks and research groups working on specific pieces of India’s energy transition puzzle. These discussions – by drawing on practical experiences and exploring the costs and opportunities associated with these approaches – seek to facilitate constructive engagement with government policies and interventions at the national and state levels.
In this session, we will discuss the political economy of 21st century electricity in India, with an emphasis on emerging opportunities to unwind the vicious cycle of electricity-centric redistribution and welfarism. India’s ambitious renewable energy (RE) target to install 450 GW capacity by 2030 is an important step towards a 21st century electricity system. The penetration of RE at such a scale is likely to shake the economic foundations of the system, lead to disruptive politics, and thus, create winners and losers. Simultaneously, it opens opportunities to address long-persisting electricity problems. Will the benefits of low-cost RE be appropriated by industry and large commercial users to free themselves from the redistributive pressures, but at the cost of imperilling the quality of service to the poorest? Or can the benefits be channelled directly to farmers and low-income consumers, thereby freeing the sector from a long and debilitating subsidy burden? The answer lies in the institutional arrangements through which RE spreads. The webinar aims to discuss an institutional approach to include the poor as change agents of the energy transition.
