Author: cprindia

Electricity use in Indian homes – from lights, ceiling fans, televisions, refrigerators, among other appliances – has increased 50 times between today and 1971 (seen in Figure 1), even though India’s  per capita residential electricity consumption is less than a third of the world average. Residential electricity now outpaces growth in industrial, commercial and agriculture sectors. This striking statistic is on the increase, as India moves towards one of the largest urban transitions in history in the coming decades. What is the implication of this transition for household electricity use, as the urban population grows and income levels rise? What do we know about how electricity is currently used in homes across the country? And what drives our dramatically changing consumption patterns?

These questions form the basis of a new series on residential electricity consumption, jointly authored by the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and the Prayas (Energy Group), Pune. In a weekly post for the next two months, CPR and Prayas will provide research findings on the nature of India’s residential electricity use. These findings draw from recently published work, and from new research that will be published in the next few months.

Specifically, the CPR findings are based on two new energy services surveys: 700 households in affordable housing units in Rajkot; and 5500 households representative of the National Capital Region or the broader Delhi area. The Prayas findings draw from two recent reports: a study to analyse the impacts of India’s large-scale LED bulb market transformation programme; and review of trends in India’s residential electricity consumption.

This series has two motivations:

• First, is the sheer scale of residential growth and the challenge of meeting this demand in a sustainable manner. India’s residences, which avail modern energy services such as cooling, clean cooking, lighting, and media access are predicted to account for 85% of the country’s floor space by 2050. The population’s development and lifestyle needs, coupled with the government’s aim to provide uninterrupted electricity to all homes by 2019, is projected to increase electricity consumption five to six times between 2014 and 2030. A combination of rapid electrification, increasing incomes, and technological development will result in people buying more appliances and using more electricity to run them. Already, the residential sector uses about 25% of the country’s total current electricity consumption (with a nine per cent growth in 2015-16) – at a time when less than a quarter of all households do not have an electricity connection and those that do face frequent power cuts.

Figure 1: Trend in Residential Electricity Consumption in India (1971-2015). Decimals are approximated to their closest whole numbers.
Source: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) & Central Electricity Authority (CEA) data

• The second motivation is that in spite of the scale of current and future residential electricity use, an understanding of household consumption patterns and their drivers is limited. There is scarce publicly available data on the issue – evidenced by Figure 2, which shows how different studies predict dramatically different scenarios for the extent to which residential electricity use will grow. This large variation stems from differing methods, base-years and assumptions, even in business-as-usual cases. Variations also exist between government estimates, as seen by the difference in projections from the 18^th and 19^th Electric Power Survey (of India’s Central Electricity Authority). This uncertainty in future demand estimates is a significant barrier to strategic energy and climate planning. Beyond quantitative data, we also lack an understanding of the social and political processes conditioning electricity consumption such as appliance purchasing decisions, success of efficiency policies, and electricity use and conservation behaviour. A rigorous understanding of residential consumption is essential for designing effective and credible energy efficiency programmes, optimising planning of power capacity addition, and to adequately adapt to changing business models and technologies.

Figure 2: Projections from various studies (Base case scenarios)

The scale of increased residential demand, the uncertainty in the extent to which it could increase, and the urban and demographic transitions underway make future electricity needs not only immense, but also potentially malleable. If unaddressed, this demand will put serious constraints on already stretched national resources, posing serious social, local environmental and climate change related burdens. But if considered strategically, the increased demand could be an opportunity – to lock-in an energy efficient and low-carbon development path. More so, demand-side interventions could substantially reduce the requirements of energy supply, bypass the structural inefficiencies and financial losses prevalent in electricity distribution, and shape path-dependent consumption trajectories.

But in order to do so, the first step is understanding in detail how electricity is used today and the services that households seek the most. This new series aims to shed light on this question.

In the next blog, we will look at the broad trends of residential electricity consumption across different states in India and also highlight the disparity of electricity consumption at the household level. The Prayas website can be accessed here.

We would be grateful for your feedback on this series and request you to answer this short 5-minute survey.

The authors of this piece are Radhika Khosla (CPR) and Aditya Chunekar (Prayas).

To subscribe to email updates on the series, click here.

Other posts in this series:

• Trends in India’s Residential Electricity Consumption
• India’s LED Lighting Story
• Illuminating Affordable Homes
• The Efficiency of Appliances
• Appliances used in Affordable Housing
• Electrifying the National Capital Region
• Exploring the different uses of household appliances
• Role of human behaviour in driving electricity use

Despite the increasing popularity of participatory approaches in urban planning and design, the voices of children remain relatively unheard by professionals and citizens who contribute to shaping living environments. In India, children are simultaneously seen through the economic lens, as the future workforce, and through a rights-based lens that portrays children among the weak, vulnerable members of society – those without a voice and agency.

In this context, despite the recognition of the criticality of play in the development of children, planned or spontaneous interventions in creating conducive play spaces are rare in Indian cities and society sees play in opposition to ‘useful’ activities such as learning and working.

The world over, researchers and practitioners in an array of fields, including child psychology, education, landscape architecture, planning and design are collaborating to raise awareness and disseminate knowledge about appropriate play environments for children. Some of these global experiences are captured in How to Grow a Playspace, edited by Australian landscape architects Katherine Masiulanis and Elizabeth Cummins.

Mukta Naik’s chapter, titled Of Agency, Participation and Design: Two Contrasting Play Scenarios in Indian Cities in the book How to Grow a Playspace: Development and Design draws from two contrasting situations – a gated upper class neighbourhood and an informal settlement in Delhi – to highlight how children continue to be excluded from conversation about design and public space.

In the first scenario, parks become sites of contestation as they are appropriated by other older citizens who claim a superior form of citizenship and even resort to litigation to impose their idea of a neighbourhood park as a pristine and beautiful place of repose. That court judgements blame the situation on poor planning hardly remedies the situation for children, who must continue to rely on adults to support them in a country where conversations about a Right to Play are only emerging.

In the case of the informal settlement, a lack of demarcated play spaces or poor maintenance of these, results in the creative use of streets, courtyards and corridors especially at certain times of the day. Sadly, where experiments with participative design and planning have been conducted in India, children have likely articulated the concerns they overhear from adults, like the need for better infrastructure like street lighting, water supply or sanitation.

In conclusion, the chapter outlines the need for designers, planners and citizen activists to leverage child-led participatory approaches to design meaningful play spaces through strategic and creative interventions. By presenting these Indian cases in an international publication, the chapter seeks to highlight the complexity of spatial planning in the Global South and seek participatory rather than purely technical solutions for design issues.

The publisher page for the book featuring the chapter can be accessed here.

By Prepcom3, the last of three preparatory meetings to debate the intent and content of UN Habitat’s ‘New Urban Agenda’, member States were expected to agree on a way forward to improve the quality of human life by focusing on cities. Negotiations in Surabaya were to conclude with an outcome document to be signed at the Habitat III conference planned at Quito, Ecuador, in October, 2016.

While the negotiations were unsuccessful in reaching a resolution, thus necessitating informal talks between now and October, discussions at Surabaya reflect global trends and ideas to find solutions to the problems of the urban millennium.

The reflections below share key takeaways from Prepcom3 in general, and from the Centre for Policy Research–Institut de recherche pour le développement (CPR-IRD) event on 26 July 2016, specifically.

Prepcom3: from ‘settlements’ to cities– deliberating estimates and definition

The shift in focus from improving human settlements (Istanbul Declaration of 1996) to viewing urbanisation as one of ‘the 21^st century’s most transformative trends’ appears to be premised on a belief that the world’s urban population will ‘nearly double’ by 2050. The base figure for this is, however, not clarified in the latest draft of the New Urban Agenda, released in July this year.

The earlier zero draft, which was released in May 2016, however, stated that by 2050, the proportion of people in the world living in urban areas ‘will reach nearly 70%’. This whittling down of the extent of urbanisation is a reflection of the concern expressed by member States and stakeholders over the legitimacy of urbanisation estimates.

Indeed, there are pressing concerns on how ‘urban’ is understood given the varying definitions used across the world, and it is unclear whether an emphasis on urban is the best approach to providing sustainable and adequate housing to underserved populations across the world who live in settlements with varying spatial and socio-economic characteristics.

CPR-IRD event on small cities and informal settlements: expanding the notion of the urban

While the thrust of the side and parallel events at Prepcom3 was on discussing solutions and strategies for equitable, sustainable and resilient urban development, the side event organised by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in partnership with Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) on 26 July sought to expand the current notions of what is urban beyond the metropolis to embrace informal settlements and small cities.

Arguing that informal settlements and small cities have similarities in terms of scale, precariousness and lack of basic infrastructure, the event sought to see the urban in fresh ways, moving beyond spaces defined in terms of the legality of tenure, inclusion in plan and stringent governance frameworks.

Using examples of problems related to the provision of basic services like water and sanitation, panellists—Valerie Clerc of IRD, Mukta Naik of CPR, Gopa Samanta of University of Burdwan, Khairul Islam of WaterAid Bangaldesh and Shanawez Hossain on BRAC University—sought to highlight technological advancements in non-sewer sanitation, the successful use of community-based processes to access potable water, and innovative governance models like slab-based water pricing as potential solutions, that could address context-specific urban problems.

The interactive session, attended by over 70 delegates, raised questions on the dovetailing of traditional planning tools with community-based systems of knowledge and implementation. A storified version of the live tweets from the panel and plenary session of the conference can be accessed here.

The return of ‘planning’: the dominant message

That many discussions at Prepcom3, including the CPR-IRD side event, debated the modalities of planning and its role in meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was no coincidence. In a marked change of stance since the Istanbul Declaration, which had nearly no mention of planning, the centrality of planning as a tool to achieve sustainable urban development is evident in the current draft of the New Urban Agenda.

When Shipra Narang Suri, President ISOCARP, the global association of professional planners dramatically exclaimed, ‘planning is back!’ at a UN Habitat side event at Prepcom3, her tone reflected the struggles and the possibilities of this shift.

The good news is that notions of planning have expanded to address multiple scales–supranational, national, metropolitan, city, and neighbourhood. In fact, the UN Habitat has brought out International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning (IG-UTP), and is developing a comprehensive compendium of illustrative practices to guide national, regional and local governments.

The guidelines, currently available in 12 languages, contain case studies from across the world that demonstrate the successful use of a variety of planning processes that integrate elements of physical and strategic planning in achieving more compact, socially inclusive, better integrated and connected cities that are resilient to climate change.

For Indian cities, this necessitates a relook at planning components and implementation strategies, especially at municipal governance frameworks and capacities. When the journey from Surabaya to Delhi ends in a three-hour traffic jam caused by water logging and poor traffic management, the importance of dovetailing policy and planning with management capacities and implementation is brought home in a rather emphatic manner.

See video of India’s official statement at PrepCom3 and read the Habitat III National Report.

Watch the full video of the workshop (above), where Jayaraj Sundaresan examines the relationship between the epistemological categories of planning and participation based on his experience of land use planning politics in Bangalore.

Through the workshop, Sundaresan attempts to answer key questions surrounding participation in the planning process, such as: Does participation happen only during the making of key decisions that underlie ‘the plan’ or also in devising appropriate planning instruments? Should it also happen during the implementation and enforcement process? Should participants have a say in every planning application in their neighbourhood and beyond, including in devising the planning system and its governance?

The two-part question and answer session that followed can be accessed here: Part 1, Part 2

More details about the talk can be accessed at the dedicated event listing here.

Philippe Cullet, a senior visiting fellow at CPR, has been appointed as member of three government committees set up by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation to draft water legislations for India.

The three committees include:

• Committee to Draft National Water Framework Law–set up in December, 2015, to draft a National Water Framework Law on the basis of the two existing drafts.
• Committee to Re-draft the Draft Model Bill for Conservation Protection and Regulation of Ground Water, 2011–set up in October, 2015, to re-draft the said Bill.
• Committee to Draft River Basin Management Bill–set up in December, 2015, to work further on the Draft River Basin Management Bill, 2012.

Cullet has been particularly involved in the drafting of the National Water Framework Law, and the re-drafting of the Model Bill for Conservation Protection and Regulation of Groundwater, 2011.

Based on extensive field work, CPR researchers Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi, and Ashish Ranjan share insights on how the Trinamool Congress (TMC) fared when judged for its performance over the last 5 years against 34 years of Left rule. Through her charismatic leadership and by focusing heavily on infrastructural improvement, they analyse how Mamata Banerjee demonstrated the change she promised when she came to power in 2011.

Read the full analysis here.

In the third instalment of a monthly op-ed series in the Hindustan Times entitled ‘Clearing the Air’, Professor Navroz K Dubash examines the elements of a long-term plan that could address the root causes of India’s air pollution crisis.

We are in the midst of that season in north India, when air quality debates die down, and parents send their children out to play. After all, the air quality index suggests “moderate” and “poor” air days, with hardly a “very poor” or “severe”. Of course, at moderate levels, the level of PM2.5 is still 2.5-3.5 times the World Health Organization (WHO) safe levels, and poor is 3.5-5 times higher. But given what Delhi feels like in the winter months, February and March seem positively inviting. After all, one cannot worry about air quality all year round, right?

Unfortunately, wrong. We may have no option but to send our children out to play, but we should also be simultaneously working hard on long-term solutions. During the apocalyptic winter months, justifiable cries of alarm translate to reactive measures: an (ineffectual) firecracker ban, throwing money at “Happy Seeders” to stop crop burning, and periodic bans on truck traffic. Some short-term response measures are needed for emergencies. But to make a real dent in the air problem requires measures to address the deep-rooted causes and not simply react to the symptoms. This is best done when we are not in panic mode.

The recent National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) is a missed opportunity to establish a long-term strategy. It sets a target without a realistic road map, proposes a city-based approach that downplays regional effects, and adopts a something-for-everyone approach rather than prioritising action. In the midst of election season, formulating a serious approach to air quality plan remains a missed political opportunity. So, what are elements of a long-term plan that truly starts the long, slow business of addressing root causes?

First, a truly effective strategy will place the challenge of ensuring compliance and enabling enforcement at the heart of pollution regulation. Too often, actions are written as if enforcement is a secondary challenge when it is actually primary. For example, to limit industrial pollution, will a combination of monitoring technology, strengthened laws, and enhanced capabilities of pollution control authorities work? Or is the enforcement challenge so great that we should simply force industries to switch to cleaner, if costlier, fuels, which may be easier to monitor? The answer is not entirely clear, but this is the question that should inform strategic policymaking.

Second, many pollution sources need multifaceted responses. For example, waste burning may best be addressed by upstream shifts in consumer behaviour, to limit waste at source. Transport emissions need a mix of public transport investments, behavioural change in transport patterns, and new transport technologies such as electric vehicles. Reactive solutions, such as banning waste burning or certain forms of transport, are but band aids.

Third, many solutions require negotiated solutions to political and economic challenges. Crop burning is unlikely to be solved by a technical solution if not burning crops costs more. The resolution lies in political negotiations around cropping pattern shifts, agricultural support policies and water use policies. Political negotiations take time and need to start now, before pressure for quick fixes sets in.

Fourth, a city-by-city approach is invariably limited. Much pollution occurs outside cities — by industry, brick kilns, power plants and crop burning. City boundary based regulation only encourages emissions leakage such as relocation of industries to the outskirts. India has to develop regulatory institutions that operate at the level of the regional “airshed”.

Fifth, we need to pick a short list of big wins to demonstrate progress and rally the public. But equally, these need to be carefully selected and maximally supported rather than the current scattershot approach. The Ujjwala scheme to provide clean cooking gas, introducing Bharat Stage VI fuels, improved power plant regulations and investment in public transport are three winning medium-term solutions. A strategic and limited set of such solutions need aggressive action.

Let us not fool ourselves. North India’s air pollution will not improve substantially for at least a few years. The scale is too large, the pollution patterns too entrenched, and the enforcement challenges too deep. But this time frame of years will stretch to decades if we do not lay the groundwork now. Reactive, limited and short-term action taken in the panic of the winter smog won’t even put us on the path to a medium-term solution. We have to keep our eye on the ball, even when the air appears clear, and invest in the necessary long-term technological, institutional and political changes.

Navroz K Dubash is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research. This is the third article in a monthly op-ed series in the Hindustan Times entitled ‘Clearing the Air.’ The original article, which was posted on April 4, 2019, can be found here.

Read more in the Clearing the Air series:

• India needs environmental governance
• Green industrial policy is a timely idea for India to explore
• Can India grow now and clean up later? No, it can’t
• How to Avoid the Middle Income Trap

Watch the video (above) of an in-depth panel discussion on the concepts integral to the realisation of the Right to Education (RTE), drawing on international experience as well. The discussion focused on the socio-political context; the framing of the ‘rights’ debate; the role of non-state actors; the historical evolution of the RTE Act, and the legal issues surrounding its implementation in India. Experts from the Unites States and Colombia also shared their experiences, providing for cross-learning.

For a summary of the discussion, access the report here.

The dedicated event page can be visited here.

Watch the full video (above) of the inaugural panel of CPR’s new series, Talking Rights Seriously, on ‘Informational Privacy in India: Aadhaar and Beyond’, featuring Meenakshi Arora, Dr Arghya Sengupta, Zoheb Hossain, Vrinda Bhandari and Ananth Padmanabhan.

The panel discussed the recent Supreme Court verdict on the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar Act and the scheme in general, and its implications for the right to informational privacy. The Aadhaar scheme, formally rolled out from 2011 to enrol citizens for the world’s largest digital identities project yet, has attracted considerable public debate and attention. The scheme’s journey through the past seven years places spotlight on various challenges faced when attempting to overcome governance chokepoints through technological means. Of these, the biggest challenge by far has been the rights challenge as no State initiative can bypass constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights to achieve any social goal howsoever desirable. While upholding the fundamental character of the right to privacy in this regard and acknowledging the inherent tension between a datafied society and this all-important facet of human dignity, the Supreme Court in Puttaswamy (2017) also articulated a broad framework to think through and arrive at constitutionally permissible and impermissible tradeoffs. The Aadhaar verdict (2018) is the first real application of this framework and hence critical to India’s rights jurisprudence.

The panel brought together senior lawyers and experts who have contested and defended the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar Act before the Supreme Court, to share their insights on various aspects of this verdict pertaining to informational privacy.

Meenakshi Arora is a Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India.

Dr Arghya Sengupta is Research Director at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

Zoheb Hossain is an Advocate, Supreme Court of India.

Vrinda Bhandari is an Advocate, Supreme Court of India.

The session was moderated by Ananth Padmanabhan, Fellow, Technology & Society Initiative, CPR.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

About the Series

The Indian Supreme Court has been actively engaged of late with recognising the right to privacy including informational privacy as part of fundamental rights, laying down the contours of free speech and expression in the internet era while revisiting the law of sedition, adjudicating the constitutional validity of criminal laws that are vestiges of a long-gone Victorian era, sensitising personal laws and religious customs to the idea of gender equality and personal freedoms, and framing the scope and meaning of the right to life and personal dignity within the broader context of socio-economic rights that make life meaningful. Similarly, Parliament has begun playing a more active role in this rights discourse by cementing the position of socio-economic rights, hitherto considered part of the non-justiciable directive principles of state policy, within the firmament of statutorily enforceable rights.

With this background, the Centre for Policy Research is starting a new series, Talking Rights Seriously, conceptualised as a discussion platform to critically examine important judicial verdicts and legislative interventions addressing the theme of rights in India.

Since 2010, the Accountability Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research has been tracking social sector spending in India in key programmes. Last month, it released four papers that tracked budget and fund flows in elementary education, public health and Panchayats. These included:

• How much does India spend per student on elementary education?  Analysing the relationship between per student public expenditure and learning levels, as well as the inefficiency of government expenditure.
• Rules vs responsiveness: Towards building an outcome-focused approach to governing elementary education finances in India.
• Value Subtraction in Public Sector Production: Accounting Versus Economic Cost of Primary Schooling in India: Through comparing both the “accounting cost” difference of public and private schools, and the “economic cost”, analysing what it would take public schools, at their existing efficacy in producing learning, to achieve the learning results of the private sector.
• A contemporary analysis of fiscal transfers to rural local government in India: Covering three broad aspects of rural local bodies (RLB) in India – i) ‘core functions’ of Panchayats, ii) cost incurred for these core services, iii) incomes and expenditures of RLBs.
• Review of intergovernmental fiscal transfers for health: lessons learned and looking ahead: Empirical evidence about the effectiveness and efficiency of fiscal transfers from central to state governments, especially with regard to improving health outcomes.

A detailed discussion on the implications of the 14th Finance Commission’s recommendations on social sector spending, and what should be the key research questions, going forward, followed. CPR president Pratap Bhanu Mehta moderated the discussion. The full video of the panel discussion can be viewed above.