Watch the full video (above) of the talk by Amita Baviskar on the role of processed foods in the cultural imagination of Indians across regions, classes, and the rural-urban continuum.
Baviskar argues that the consumption practices industrial foods engender are productive sites for imagining citizenship cutting across social hierarchies, creating new identities, and diluting stigmatised ones.
Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.
MANJU MENON AND KANCHI KOHLI COMMENT ON THE ENVIRONMENT MINISTRY’S NEW NOTIFICATION
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Violating units to be put through a simplified EC process, no public hearings, and EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessment) only to determine conditions of clearance.
This piece can also be accessed in: हिंदी | ગુજરાતી | ಕನ್ನಡ | ନୀୟ
On March 14, 2017, the Environment Ministry issued a notification providing a chance to all projects operating without Environmental Clearances (EC) to apply for ECs. Basically, the government has offered a scheme to turn illegal projects into legal units just as tax defaulters are offered a one-time reprieve. However, this notification will have any effect only if violators take up this offer.
Last year in May, the Ministry had issued a draft notification, which proposed that projects/activities that have violated the EIA notification be allowed to continue their activities by agreeing to an Environment Supplemental Plan (ESP). After having received criticism for this draft (see submission by CPR-Namati EJ program, policy brief by Shibani Ghosh of CPR, and Ritwick Dutta’s article in the Deccan Herald), the Ministry has now issued a revised final notification. In this version, the government has put in place a process by which the Expert Appraisal Committee at the Central level will determine the conditions for their continued operations. The Ministry has so far not put out any list of violating projects that could apply under this scheme.
Projects that could benefit from this scheme that invites them to apply for EC within six months may have grabbed land illegally, by coercion or deceit, set up their units and operated without any environmental regulations or social safeguards in place. Past cases and studies on illegal operations by projects have shown that those who flout environmental norms are the ones with deep pockets and close ties to those in power. The lack of effective monitoring by regulatory agencies such as the Pollution Control Boards and the regional offices of the Environment Ministry has caused these violations to take place with impunity. Project violations continue unchecked for years, and despite complaints from neighbourhoods, panchayats and local authorities.
The CPR-Namati EJ Program sought information regarding the process and materials that were being considered by the Ministry to finalise this notification. An RTI application was filed on 31.10.2016 with the Ministry’s Public Information Officer (PIO) seeking details of the discussions, revision and finalisation of draft notification S.O. 1705(E), dated 10.05.2016, regarding the use of Environmental Supplemental Plan. However, the Ministry ignored the application and no information was provided. The first appeal was filed on 16.01.2017. This appeal, too, was completely disregarded. Now the Ministry has gone ahead and issued the new notification S.O. 804(E) on 14.03.2017. Yet again, the Ministry is in violation of the judgement of the Central Information Commission in CIC/SA/A/2016/000209, ordering the Ministry to provide information regarding the process of finalisation of policies in the interest of the public. This notification, which deals with the important issue of non-compliance by projects and what actions are to be taken in this regard, is of significant relevance to the lives of many people suffering the impacts of these illegal projects, and affects the environment as well. By denying access to information regarding the process by which this notification was finalised, the government has denied citizens and experts the opportunity to participate in such decision-making.
Thus, this notification shows the government’s support for industrial and corporate corruption and illegality despite all the talk about rooting out corruption.
Main issues with the Notification:
Besides the issue of regularising projects that have violated laws and that operate without environmental safeguards, the process of regularisation laid out in the notification shows how governments favour these projects. The process shields them from public consultation procedures and denies a hearing to those who have suffered public harms on account of these violating units.
Notification: The cases of violating units will be brought to the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) at the central level (irrespective of whether the project is Category A or B). The EAC will check if the project violates any legal siting norms (like forest areas and CRZ – Coastal Regulation Zone) or if the expansion can run sustainably with compliance of environmental conditions and safeguards. If the EAC finds these two aspects to be negative, then they can recommend closure.
Comment: This principle goes against the rule of law because violating units are given a chance for a back door entry. At this stage the EAC does not have enough information about the project expansion to decide whether it can run sustainably or if the siting is without ecological and social impacts as it has no studies or information related to impacts to go by. Such information will only be provided after the decision on the project is taken by the EAC. Also, it is highly unlikely that projects that are up and running will be closed down under this process. In fact, it is because the government does not want to close illegal projects that this scheme is being provided.
Notification: If the EAC decides that the project can be allowed to continue, then the project needs to undertake an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) based on a Terms of Reference and Environment Management Plan (EMP), and conduct an assessment of ecological damage; prepare a remediation plan; and a natural and community resource augumentation plan as an independent chapter of the EIA report. This is to be done by a National Accreditation Board for Education and Training (NABET)–Quality Council of India (QCI) certified consultant and a lab authorized by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
Comment: As per the process set up in the Notification, this EIA and EMP related steps will not have any influence on the decision of the project as the decision to legalise the project would be taken by the EAC before the EIA is drafted, as mentioned in the previous point. In this Notification, the EIA is only to determine mitigation and compensatory measures. There is no scope of a public hearing either after the EIA report is drafted as is the usual norm in the process of grant of environment clearance. So the government is offering a ‘simplified’ EIA process to the violator.
Notification: The EAC has to determine that these plans take into account the damage to the environment and the economic benefits gained by violating the law. This is to be done by adding conditions in the Environment Clearance (EC) letter issued to the project.
Comment: This is a form of regularising the violation as the shortened EIA process comes after the decision to regularise the project and the EIA’s only function is to provide knowledge about what kinds of conditions and safeguards need to be added to the project’s EC letter. In effect, thiw would only offset the damage caused by the violation as opposed to putting a stop to it. Going by the track record of compliance to conditions, these new sets of conditions may also end up being only on paper. Even though there is a mention that the natural and community resource augmentation plan will be prepared, there is no process in this to speak to affected people and find out what impacts they have faced, which need remedies (please see recent report on effectiveness of environment regulation).
Notification: The violator has to submit a bank guarantee to the State Pollution Control Board (SPCB). The amount should be equal to the amount of the cost of the various plans (management, remediation and augmentation). The costing will be determined by the EAC. The Bank guarantee should be deposited before the EC is granted and returned after the successful implementation of the plans.
Comment: The government cannot singly determine what ‘successful implementation’ is. The Vapi case is a good example, where even though pollution on the ground has not reduced, and the Vapi Action Plan has not been fully implemented, the government has removed its ‘critically polluted’ tag, allowing for more projects to be set up there. There is no mechanism here which indicates how the SPCB and EAC will coordinate to supervise this.
Notification: The SPCB will not grant Consent to Operate or occupancy to these violating projects until the EC process is completed.
Comment: The notification says that once the violating project is identified, the state/SPCB will take action under Section 19 of the Environment (Protection) Act. This section bars the courts from taking notice of the violation until it is brought to them by the central government or a designated authority or by any person (who has given a 60 day notice to the government or designated authority).
This one-time amnesty through the latest notification has been offered by the government for units that have violated the EIA notification and set up operations without ECs until the date of this notification. Units have to apply for ECs within six months from the date of this notification. The notification does not state what will be done to violating units that do not apply for EC within this period. It also does not state if this is only a one-time amnesty or whether there will be more such opportunities and also about what will be done with units that violate EIA norms after this notification date. Finally, there are several other environmental norms that are violated as much as the EIA notification. Will this be the treatment for those cases too?
CPR CO-ORGANISES WORKSHOP AT HK-SHENZHEN BIENNALE
URBAN SERVICES
The Government of India’s premier think tank NITI Aayog, in its three-year action agenda, has called for India to replicate the success of Shenzhen in China, not just as a successful Special Economic Zone but also as a shining example of organized urbanisation and modernization. Worldwide, Shenzhen has been upheld as a model for its rapid growth, for the boomtown phenomenon it spearheaded nicknamed ‘Shenzhen Speed’, earning it the moniker ‘Instant City’. But there’s more to Shenzhen than meets the eye. Can its success really be replicated? Can we really learn from Shenzhen, and if yes, how?
The urbanisation team at the Centre for Policy Research has been, since 2016, in a dialogue with scholars working on Shenzhen, to explore some of these questions. On 12-14 January 2018, CPR co-organised a workshop
Titled ‘Informal Plans, Planned Informality: Shenzhen as Model and Field’ at the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Architecture and Urbanism Biennale (UABB) to examine one of Shenzhen’s most prominent but least understood characteristics, the role of informality in the success of the city. The workshop was conceptualized by Mary Ann O’Donnell (Handshake 302, Shenzhen), Jonathan Bach (Associate Professor, Global Studies, The New School, New York) and Mukta Naik (Senior Researcher, CPR, New Delhi) and supported by the India China Institute.
Looking at informality as a necessary element of contemporary urbanisation, the workshop was an empirical exploration of how informality produces, and is produced by, the coevolution of the planned and the unplanned most visibly expressed by the continued relevance of, and changing State attitude to, urban villages. On Day 1, presentations by young scholars Kim Do Dom (PhD candidate in Anthropology at University of Chicago), Cai Yifan (PhD Candidate in Geography at Clark University) and Fu Na (Graduate Student, New School) generated a lively discussion on elements of informality in the realms of citizenship, intellectual property rights and entrepreneurship in Shenzhen. Post-lunch, Shaun Teo’s (PhD Candidate in Geography, University College London) guided exploration of the UABB venue and exhibits offered insights into the salient urban questions being asked by practitioners and researchers in the Pearl River Delta. Inclusion, participation, identity and sustainability were some of the recurring themes, in line with the UABB’s intention of being a space for critical thinking and free expression. Ironically Nantou village, its main site, was both sanitised and under surveillance, raising questions about the impact of large events on city neighborhoods.
On Day 2, Indian scholars took the stage, viewing Shenzhen ‘from’ India. CPR researchers Partha Mukhopadhyay and Mukta Naik reacted to the book ‘Learning from Shenzhen’ edited by Jonathan Bach, Mary Ann O’Donnell and Winnie Wong using examples of four Indian urban projects—Dholera, Sri City, Amravati and Gurgaon. Vamsi Valukabharanam from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, spoke about spatial inequalities in Indian cities, using the example of Hyderabad. Rohit Negi from Ambedkar University, Delhi, used the conversation on air quality in urban locations as a theme to explore the intersections between urban equity and ecology. Du Juan from Hong Kong University presented innovative design work done at her design lab that helped improve the habitat of renters in Hong Kong’s ultra-crowded subdivided apartments. In the afternoon, participants were treated to an exploration of Shennan Boulevard, Shenzhen’s major east-west road, led by anthropologist Zhou Ximin.
The conversations from the morning sessions spilled over onto the delectable lunches on both days, as participants discovered mutual interests, satisfied their curiosity about new cultures and raised provocative questions. It was no surprise that the writing workshop conducted by Mary Ann on Day 3, emerged as both introspection and synthesis, a delightful discovery of the power of written word to merge sentiment with academic insight.
A final visit to the Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening reminded us that as much as Shenzhen was a product of the selective absence of the State, it was also born of innovation and vision in the aftermath of Maoist socialism. In the spirit of comparison, we believe that studying Shenzhen, and perhaps other Chinese citymaking experiments, can reveal alternate possibilities to Indian cities, especially in accommodating informality even as they pursue the dream of modernity and ‘world-class’ urbanity. The workshop, in this sense, was another step in a continuing effort to “track algorithms that constantly produce…borders, which in turn keep re-producing the city”. As Mary Ann asks in her highly nuanced workshop report, “what does it mean…. to document uncertainty?”
TAKEWAYS FROM JOURNAL ARTICLE BY MUKTA NAIK
URBAN ECONOMY URBAN SERVICES
In an article titled, Negotiation, mediation and subjectivities: How migrant renters experience informal rentals in Gurgaon’s urban villages, published in Radical Housing Journal, Mukta Naik explores the experience of low-income migrant renters in the informal rental markets of Gurgaon that are controlled and managed by village landlords. The article builds on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Nathupur village in 2013-14 and Sikanderpur village in 2017, both urban villages bordering Delhi and some of the earliest to experience land acquisition and formal sector private real estate development in Gurgaon, to shed light on living conditions, nature of landlord-tenant relationships and strategies of mediation adopted by migrant renters.
Highlighting takeaways from the article, this blog describes how informal rentals – broadly understood as housing located in settlements without formal tenure and/or without registered lease documentation – are organised in Gurgaon and offers insights into the lived experience of migrant renters in urban villages, which have absorbed the lion’s share of rural-urban migration into the city especially in the 2001-2011 decade.
Types of Landlordism
Naik builds on London School of Economics Professor Sunil Kumar’s work to classify landlords in informal rentals into three types: subsistence, petty-bourgeois and petty-capitalist. It is often the landlord household’s caste position within the village and the community that determines the kind of landlordism they exhibit. Closely related is the access to land and capital that they have, the latter a function of how much agricultural land they sold to private developers when this part of Gurgaon city was being developed in the ‘80s.
Rental typologies: Affordability and living conditions
Urban villages in Gurgaon exhibit a range of informal rentals for migrant tenants with different levels of income and varying expectations in terms of amenities, privacy and security. Naik’s earlier work describes the range of informal rental housing available in urban villages in Gurgaon, from shacks with temporary construction to the ubiquitous tenements and increasingly one-room sets for middle-income renters. Rental prices are higher for properties with better quality of construction and migrant renters opt for housing that they can afford and that is near their workplace.
While informal rentals are successful is creating housing supply across price points, the levels of service are generally low because urban villages are under serviced, with severe water shortage issues and inadequate sewer networks. And even though landlords and tenants suffer because of this, additional strictures like rationed water, overpriced electricity, poor construction quality and poor light and ventilation means that renters particularly experience crowding and poor living conditions.
Perception influences contractual arrangements
Despite the unequal power relations, however, Naik finds that landlords depend significantly on rentals for household incomes and migrant tenants share a symbiotic relationship with the landlord, representing them as sometimes benevolent and at other times oppressive in their accounts. Perhaps because of this, the ubiquitous oral form of contract with exclusively cash payments, is not seen as a tool of exploitation by tenants. While landlords can enforce oral contracts through the mere threat of violent repercussions, which acts as a deterrent for rent defaults, tenants leverage informality to move through the city flexibly as they seek work. Emerging forms of documentation like police verifications, employer endorsements and tenant registrations in the wake of growing paranoia around security, terrorism and illegal refugees in India’s national discourse, indicate some start points for thinking about formalisation. Clearly, perception matters in contractual agreements. The wide use of oral contracts and the underlying forms of trusts, as well as contrasting moves towards documentation, complicate the notions of secure occupancy in the context of informal rentals.
Landlord-tenant relations remain inherently unequal across the board. Migrants cannot contend with the political power that landlords have. They maintain this by colluding to keep migrants off electoral rolls, mostly by refusing them proof of address that would enable migrants to register as local voters.
These unequal power relationships result in certain specific forms of exploitation. Migrants are often considered captive customers and forced to buy rations from the landlord’s grocery store or that landlords impose behavioural norms on tenants. Tenants report particular discomfort with the surveillance that they are subjected to by landlords, who often have a shop on the street level, which can be used to watch the comings and goings of tenants. This surveillance is ostensibly intended to ensure that tenants do not overcrowd or damage their premises and use water responsibly, but also to monitor visitors. Surveillance assumes moralistic overtones, seeking to ensure that tenants of opposite genders do not mix, outside of marriage. Tenants also face discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and gender in informal rental housing. In Gurgaon, surveillance is particularly harsh for unmarried women and young girls.
Despite the inequality, Naik finds points of connect between landlords and tenants. Subsistence and petty-bourgeois landlords often have close and long-term relationships with their renters, often going out of their way to help them; not hiking rents, permitting time extensions on rent payments, helping them start small businesses. Tenants in larger rental clusters often did not know their landlord directly, but in several cases trusted caretakers acted as intermediaries, smoothening daily functioning of tenements.
Experiences of discrimination and exploitation notwithstanding, tenants commonly characterise the landlord as ‘good’ or ‘helpful’. Landlords see themselves as protectors of tenants, with nearly every landlord in the sample mentioning their role in resolving disputes amongst tenants. The tenant’s status in the urban village appears to be affiliated with that of the landlords, for instance, tenants of politically powerful, rich or upper caste landlords enjoyed an implicit protection from harassment.
Mediation and negotiation helps migrants gain footholds
Within this context, Naik finds that migrant tenants leverage informal rentals in particular ways to secure a small foothold in Gurgaon’s urban economy. The diversity of rental typologies helps migrants find housing of varying quality at price points that suit their income situations. They use the flexibility that oral contracts offer to move ‘through’ the city, as they seek remunerative work. Migrants routinely use praise for their landlords as a way to appease them, while simultaneously being vocal about their negative experiences. Exploiting the economic dependence of landlords on rental incomes, they carefully navigate the good landlord/bad landlord narrative to carve out independent identities over time, to achieve regular employment and local identification papers to enable a long-term stay in the city. In contrast to these subtle negotiations, female renters from northeast India resist the objectification they face from male landlords and village residents in Sikanderpur simply by continuing to wear westernised clothing and claiming the streets as retail customers and pedestrian commuters. By not cooperating with the patriarchal norms that landlords seek to impose, these women exhibit what Scott calls ‘everyday forms of resistance.’
FULL VIDEO OF PANEL DISCUSSION AS PART OF CPR DIALOGUES
ECONOMY POLITICS
Watch the full video of the panel discussion on ‘India’s 21st Century Transitions’, organised as part of CPR Dialogues, featuring Jamshyd Godrej, T N Ninan, Rajiv Kumar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, chaired by Yamini Aiyar.
How can India manage its urban transformation so that it builds inclusive, sustainable, green 21st century cities?
How can India meet its energy needs as a growing economy while shifting toward cleaner energy?
How can India overcome the twin challenges of declining agricultural productivity and weak human capital to create productive jobs in a rapidly changing 21st century economy?
How can India leverage its technology advantage and create an innovation eco-system while protecting individual and community rights?
How should India respond to shifting geo-political trends and re-position itself in a changing global order?
India today is at the cusp of significant developmental transitions. Choices made will fundamentally shape its future developmental trajectory. The policy challenge today lies in identifying appropriate pathways and institutional mechanisms to negotiate these transitions and set India on a path toward a sustainable, inclusive future. While identifying appropriate pathways, India has to navigate important tensions in our polity. One important tension is the often conflicting needs of rural vs urban populations, best demonstrated in the on-going agrarian crisis.
The second challenge is institutional. India today needs to build a new institutional framework to respond to changing needs while at the same time building the state’s capacity to manage basic, everyday tasks from health and education to building basic infrastructure. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently stated, ‘India is managing 21st century transitions with a 19th century administration.’
Finally, India is dealing with these transitions at a time when public discourse has become increasingly sharp and polarised often blurring the lines between critical engagement and partisan endorsement of ideas. This polarisation has made sober, objective evaluation of policy choices confronting India today, difficult resulting in the adoption of short term and often unsustainable quick fixes. The opening panel to CPR Dialogues 2018 explored these broad themes with a view to understanding the nature of the policy choices India confronts today, the intersections between them, government’s perspective on the way forward, and the broader political economy.
Yamini Aiyar is the President and Chief Executive at CPR.
Jamshyd Godrej is Chairman and MD, Godrej and Boyce.
T N Ninan is Chairman, Business Standard Ltd.
Rajiv Kumar is Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University.
The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.
Yamini Aiyar’s article in the Hindustan Times (print partner for CPR Dialogues) can be accessed here.
Coverage of the panel by ThePrint (digital partner for CPR Dialogues) can be accessed here.
Watch the interviews of Jamshyd Godrej and Rajiv Kumar with ThePrint.
CPR FACULTY ANALYSE
POLITICS SOUTH ASIA INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
As India made a bid for NSG membership at Seoul in June, 2016, and was opposed by China, CPR faculty analyse it from different aspects:
In The Hindu, Shyam Saran analyses China’s public stand against India’s membership in the NSG, contextualising it historically, and suggests that India should carefully assess the ongoing geopolitical changes, and ‘fashion an appropriate response strategy’.
In The Great Delusion, Pratap Bhanu Mehta analyses the reasons for India’s failed NSG bid from different angles.
In another interview to Firstpost, Saran writes that despite the failed bid, India ‘should engage in quiet but active diplomacy, to mobilise greater support within the NSG, including winning over China,’ since China was unlikely to risk a setback to India-China relations in the long run.
In a two part interview with The Wire (Part 1, Part 2), Shyam Saran again analyses the reasons behind China’s stance at Seoul, and says that India must not make NSG membership an elemental issue, as well as deal with China taking into account its very complex relationship with the country, which is both adversarial and collaborative in nature.
ACCESS THE FULL JOURNAL ARTICLE
CLIMATE RESEARCH ENERGY RESEARCH
How can India undertake its large projected growth in buildings while simultaneously meeting its development, energy and climate objectives? The Building and Research Information special issue sets out to help answer this question by developing and extending the growing body of research on the topic, with the aim to help define the built environment in India as an emerging and important field of socio-technical enquiry. The special issue’s framing of the problem departs from the often used techno-economic view and instead suggests that both technical infrastructures, such as the built environment, and social infrastructures, such as policies, professions, habits and norms, shape behaviour, and as a consequence offer significant potential for reducing overall energy demand and GHG emissions. This editorial, which contextualizes the special issue, sets a three-pronged multidisciplinary framework for current and future research on India’s building stock, and associates the papers in the special issue with this agenda. It also points to the importance of international research collaborations in seeking solutions to India’s energy and climate change challenges.
NEW JOURNAL ARTICLE CO-AUTHORED BY NAVROZ K DUBASH, RADHIKA KHOSLA, ANKIT BHARDWAJ, AND NARASIMHA D RAO
CLIMATE RESEARCH ENERGY RESEARCH
Over the last few years, India has variously been presented in the global climate debate as an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker, and a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India’s energy and emissions future, however, is challenged by the uncertainties of India’s development transitions. Based on an interpretive analysis of 7 leading studies on CO2 emissions from energy, this paper concludes that given current policies, a doubling of India’s emissions from 2012 levels is a likely upper bound for emissions in 2030, and that this level is consistent with India’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), as the graphic below suggests.
The paper, published in Environmental Research Letters, discusses the implications of these results for India’s energy sector. It is open-access and available for download and can be found here.
Part 3 of a blog series by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Prayas (Energy Group)
The series is titled ‘Plugging in: Electricity consumption in Indian Homes’.
Lighting is the most basic use of electricity in a home. Lighting’s share in the total residential electricity consumption is estimated to be in the range of 18% to 27%. In 2013, about a billion and a half lighting devices were sold in India; half of them being incandescent bulbs followed by CFLs (31%), tube-lights (16%) and a negligible share of LED bulbs. In 2014, the government launched a programme to promote LED bulbs in Indian households and later named it UJALA (Unnat Jyoti by Affordable LEDs for All).
This is because LED bulbs consume less electricity, last longer, and does not contain mercury. The programme, arguably the world’s largest, has sold more than 27 crore LED bulbs with no subsidy from the government. How did the programme change India’s lighting industry and consumer behaviour? What part of programme design worked and what can be improved? Answers to these questions can improve future programmes designed to improve energy efficiency in India. In this post, we discuss some key findings of our recent report where we surveyed manufacturers, retailers, households, and various stakeholders to understand the impacts of UJALA.
Innovative programme
Energy Efficiency Services Ltd. (EESL), a public sector company, is responsible for implementing the UJALA programme. The company bought LED bulbs in bulk from manufacturers through multiple rounds of competitive bidding. The large volumes and assured sales incentivised the manufacturers to drop the bid price from Rs. 310 per LED bulb in the first round to as low as Rs. 38 in later rounds. EESL sold these bulbs to consumers through contract vendors in co-ordination with the local electricity distribution companies (discoms), bypassing the retail supply chain and further bringing down the final distribution price. As a result, the current price of LED bulbs under UJALA is Rs. 70, about half of the price of the LED bulbs available in the shops. Yet, there is no subsidy from the government or the discoms. EESL also conducted innovative marketing campaigns to create public awareness.
LED bulb sales are up and prices down
The UJALA programme transformed the LED lighting industry in India. Demand for LED bulbs has gone up 50 times in the three years since 2014, while the retail market price (for bulbs sold beyond UJALA) has dropped to a third. The fall in prices can be attributed to the economies of scale achieved due to substantial demand creation by the UJALA programme, in tandem with the global trend of reduction in prices of the LED chips. India’s LED bulb manufacturing capacity has also grown substantially, with about 176 registered manufacturing units in India.
Figure 1: Sales trends of lighting devices in India
Source: ELCOMA
Our surveys show that LED bulbs are now a major source of lighting for the households that participated in the UJALA programme (Figure 2). Most of the households also said that they would buy a new LED bulb from the market when the installed LED bulb reached the end of its useful life.
ncandescent bulbs are still around
The increased demand for LED bulbs seems to replace the demand for CFLs instead of incandescent bulbs. About 810 million incandescent bulbs were sold in 2016, a 5% drop over previous year’s sale whereas the sales of CFLs have dropped by a third since their peak in 2013 (Figure 1). Our surveys corroborate this trend as we find that a considerably large proportion of the UJALA LED bulbs were used to replace CFLs, followed by incandescent bulbs and tube lights (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Lighting options replaced by LED bulbs bought under UJALA for surveyed households
Source: Prayas Consumer survey (January – March 2017)
The more that people replace CFLs with LEDs, the lesser the saving that are actually realized. Our sample of households in Pune was distributed across different income classes. A typical LED bulb saved 2.5 times more in a low income household compared to a high income household. This makes a case for programme to focus more on low income households.
LED bulb quality and warranty is important
Our surveys found that 2% of LED bulbs failed in Pune after a year of launch of the programme, while 14% of the LED bulbs failed in Puducherry three years after the launch. The bulbs sold in Pune carried a warranty of 3 years while the bulbs sold in Puducherry carried a warranty of 8 years. However, very few households got their faulty bulbs replaced. Lower expectations from a government programme and higher tolerance levels for faults in low cost LED bulbs, ignorance about warranty, and hassles in the process were cited as reasons for not replacing the faulty bulbs under warranty.
To conclude, UJALA has created a large and sustainable market for LED bulbs in India using the no-subsidy, bulk procurement model. Demand for LED bulbs has increased manifold and the retail market price (for the LED bulbs sold beyond UJALA) has dropped by a third. It has also created a significant awareness about LED bulbs, further contributing to increasing demand. Going ahead, EESL can ensure stricter monitoring and evaluation of the programme. It can also focus on low income households and small commercial establishments who are still buying incandescent bulbs. We focus on this aspect of LED use in low income households in the next post.
This piece is authored by Aditya Chunekar and Sanjana Mulay from Prayas (Energy Group).
This blog series is also available on the Prayas website here.
This article was republished in Eklavya Magazine in Hindi under ‘स्रोत विज्ञान एवं टेक्नॉलॉजी फीचर्स’, and can be accessed here.
To subscribe to email updates on the series, click here.
India’s recent stance towards Pakistan
CPR FACULTY ANALYSE
INDIA-PAKISTAN POLITICS SOUTH ASIA
Post Burhan Wani’s death, protests in Kashmir, Pakistan’s comments on Wani and Kashmir, Rajnath Singh’s recent visit to Pakistan, and in the wake of PM Modi’s upcoming visit in November, CPR faculty comment on India’s stance towards Pakistan.
Following Rajnath Singh’s visit to Pakistan, G Parthasarathy analyses where India stands with respect to Pakistan, writing that the neighbouring country’s internal turmoil dictates its foreign policy imperatives, and that it is likely to continue its anti-India tirade.
In Playing the Baloch Card, Pratap Bhanu Mehta analyses PM Modi’s remark on Balochistan in the Independence Day speech–what it signals and whether it will make a difference.
In a discussion on NDTV (above), G Parthasarathy comments on PM Modi’s reference to Balochistan, stating that it marked a change in India’s historical approach and was likely to impact the current situation with international repercussions.
G Parthasarathy again emphasises that India is right in flagg
