Author: cprindia

ANALYSING THE PM’S RESPONSE
POLITICS KASHMIR INDIA-PAKISTAN

SOUTH ASIA
CPR faculty G Parthasarathy comments on the Prime Minister taking stock of the situation in Kashmir following the death of Burhan Wani on DD News.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO
WATER RESEARCH

Watch the full video of the talk (above) by Anthony Acciavatti focusing on a decade-long-project to create a dynamic atlas of the Ganges Machine–a method of mapping that exposes the juxtaposing layers of infrastructure and adjoining built forms. The goal of this dynamic atlas is to not only map space, but also map how spaces change over time.

Acciavatti also discusses the importance of mapping the choreography of water and human settlement at a time when the Government of India is beginning to invest a $1.5 billion loan from the World Bank to clean up the Ganges river.

A LITERATURE REVIEW AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY BY SUSAN E CHAPLIN
SANITATION URBAN SERVICES RIGHTS

Susan E Chaplin finds that existing literature provides little evidence of how sanitation inequalities impact the daily lives of poor women and girls.

What is the research about?

In this working paper, Susan Chaplin examines existing literature to find out what is known about how inequalities in urban sanitation access impacts the lives of poor women and girls, who have to queue up each morning to use public toilets, or have to decide which open defecation sites are the least dangerous to use.

How was the research conducted?’

The 68 articles and reports discussed in this literature review were largely collected using Google Scholar searches and the website Sanitation Updates, which provides regular email alerts on recently published journal articles and reports. Most of the evidence-based research and grey literature focused on India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and South Africa

What are the key findings?

Despite the focus on gender inequalities and sanitation in low income countries, within development goals, programmes, and projects, only 16 articles and reports either addressed gender inequalities or used gender analysis in examining results from their research projects.
The urban sanitation inequalities faced by working women, along with those who were ageing, disabled or living on pavements, has been largely ignored in the literature.
The linkages between gender-based violence and the lack of urban sanitation are poorly researched, documented or addressed in practice.
There is a lack of understanding in urban sanitation policies of how gender inequalities create toilet insecurity for millions of women and girls.

Conclusion

To understand how gender inequality operates at multiple levels across societies in the cities of the Global South, in relation to sanitation access, there is a critical need for better data collection which is gender aggregated. Most national statistics, at best, often just provide a very broad overview of sanitation facilities at the household level. These statistics don’t provide an adequate overview of the everyday lives of poor women and girls who are compelled to develop strategies to cope with lack of access to safe sanitation facilities. For many poor women and girls, this specifically means finding ways to cope with gender-based violence that occurs around community/public toilets and open defecation sites.
There is an urgent need to develop gender-sensitive understanding of the heterogeneous nature of slums and informal settlements, the diversity of the people who live in them, and the relationships between them, if urban sanitation inequalities are to be addressed to meet Sustainable Development Goals.
Data and research is also needed on how this lack of access impacts poor women and girls, women working in informal sectors, women with disabilities, ageing women, and homeless women. The understanding created by this new research could then be used to develop more appropriate and effective strategies to reduce gender inequalities in urban sanitation provision.

FULL VIDEO OF PANEL DISCUSSION AS PART OF CPR DIALOGUES
SOUTH ASIA INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Watch the full video of the panel discussion on ‘Geopolitics and Geo-Economics in a Changing South Asia’, organised as part of CPR Dialogues, featuring Nimmi Kurian, Zorawar Daulet Singh, Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, chaired by Srinath Raghavan.

The contemporary phase of international politics is full of uncertainty and fluidity. The US is unable to enforce its writ over the system, nor is it able to supply the public goods necessary to produce a stable and flourishing world economy. Rising powers are contending for new roles and seeking to reshape the rules that govern world order. If we step back, however, what we notice is actually a recurring cycle in world history. A pattern of struggle and competition where each epoch has ultimately produced a larger and more dynamic process of capital accumulation and international division of labour. After a struggle for leadership, the baton passes towards a new contender who resuscitates world order and assumes the onus of managing the process of economic globalisation. Does the present phase portend such a scenario? What aspects of the ongoing power transition are similar to the past and what is distinct? Can the dominant power and its rivals arrive at a modus vivendi that avoids a zero-sum confrontation?

Coming to India and its region, the changing international environment has profound consequences. Both the geoeconomic order – an open world economy where capital and goods could move relatively freely between states – and a peaceful geopolitical setting underwritten by a great power peace has enabled India since the end of the last Cold War to focus on economic growth and development. Profound changes to this status quo imply that policymakers and strategic thinkers are being called upon to supply fresh ideas and frameworks for India’s foreign policy.

If unrelenting pressures on globalisation do continue to increase, it would imperil South Asia’s economic story. Short of finance capital, non-renewable energy resources, and industrial technologies, South Asia’s transformation for the past two decades has been intrinsically linked to reliable access to economic resources from other high-income and emerging economies. Any disruption to trans-national and trans-continental interdependence, will naturally push the region to look within it own socio-economic base to sustain its economic transformation. This would place greater responsibilities on India to safeguard not only its own economic prospects but supply public goods and assist its neighbours too. And, there is no sensible reason why India must seek to do this alone with its scarce resources and growing domestic claims. Cultivating diverse partnerships are, therefore, not a luxury but a strategic necessity. Setting the terms and shaping how other major powers with greater economic heft engage with the South Asia is one of the central challenges for India’s foreign policy. What have been missing from Indian debates are more sophisticated approaches to the multitude of regional visions and connectivity ideas that are being espoused by several great powers. Can India leverage its unique location at the crossroads of many of these geoeconomic visions provides to mediate and steer Asia’s political economy evolution in directions that advance its interests?

Furthermore, a fundamental assumption – indeed a sacrosanct premise – for India’s strategic thinking in the post-Cold War period has been internalising the reality of one preponderant power centre that shaped political and economic life across the globe. This structural setting – unipolarity as it was described by many – led to a basic Indian foreign policy framework of a sustained, albeit gradual and tentative at each step, integration into the US-led order as well as of course a transformation in bilateral relations with the US and its key allies. This has been a bipartisan strategy and for the most part it could be claimed that Indian policymakers accomplished this process within the broad confines of strategic autonomy with some success. But given the geopolitical changes now underway, without a careful strategic readjustment and a sensible assessment on Asian geopolitics, India’s foreign policy risks losing the advantages that might accrue from a multipolar Asia. How should India reimagine its place in this diffusion of global power and disintegration of the unipolar consensus?

The panel explored these and related themes to understand what possible roles can India realistically adopt to shape the ongoing power transition in a way that advances its domestic transformation and security along with a stable Asian and world order.

Srinath Raghavan is a Senior Fellow at CPR.

Nimmi Kurian is a Professor at CPR.

Zorawar Daulet Singh is a Fellow at CPR.

Ambassador Shivshankar Menon is the former National Security Advisor and Indian Foreign Secretary.

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

Coverage of the panel by ThePrint (digital partner for CPR Dialogues) can be accessed here.

WATCH THE VIDEOS OF THE CONFERENCE ORGANISED BY CPR AND THE BRUEGEL INSTITUTE
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS ECONOMY

India and Europe share common interests in dealing with global economic challenges including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis of the trading system, climate change and the digital transformation. They also share and shape the global geopolitical environment within which these challenges are unfolding.

The purpose of this webinar was to compare the approaches of Europe and India to some of these common challenges and assess how far they converge or contrast with each other and what can be done to increase convergence through both multilateral and bilateral initiatives.

India and the European Union are both strong supporters of multilateralism and a rules-based global order, and influential actors in multilateral fora such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Paris Agreement. They are also strategic partners and their Leaders have endorsed at the 15th EU-India Summit held in July 2020 the “EU-India Strategic Partnership: A Roadmap to 2025” as a common roadmap to guide joint action and further strengthen the EU-India Strategic Partnership over the next five years.

The webinar consisted of four virtual sessions, each 90 minutes long, led by two panelists, one Indian and one European. All four sessions were co-chaired by Amb Shyam Saran of CPR and Andre Sapir of Bruegel. The sessions were on following topics:

Strategic Environment
Trade
Climate Change
Digital Transformation
Watch the other sessions as part of this webinar:

International trade relations in the emerging global economic order
India-Europe engagement on Climate Change
Addressing common challenges of digital transformation and promoting rule-based global data governance

FULL AUDIO OF TALK
RIGHTS POLITICS

Listen to the full audio of the talk (above) by Chandra Bhan Prasad on changing rural caste dynamics, based on his extensive travels in Uttar Pradesh. Citing stories and narratives from the field, he talks about how social, economic and political forces have come to define, dominate and reshape caste in ways that deserve serious attention from scholars as well as policymakers.

Discussing the lack of scholarly literature on evolving cast dynamics in Indian villages, Prasad highlights how increasingly the hierarchies of ‘Thakur’ and ‘Praja’ have been redefined due to greater mobility and access.

More information about the talk can be found on the event page.

CLEARING THE AIR: MONTHLY COLUMN IN THE HINDUSTAN TIMES BY NAVROZ K DUBASH
POLITICS CLIMATE CHANGE

In the sixth instalment of a monthly op-ed series in the Hindustan Times entitled ‘Clearing the Air,’ Professor Navroz K Dubash explores two equally true, but fundamentally different, ways of understanding climate change in India in light of the recent UN Climate Action Summit.

The enduring image of the United Nations (UN) Climate Action Summit held on September 23 is the young climate activist, Greta Thunberg. “How dare you continue to look away?”, she demanded, invoking wide-scale suffering, collapsing ecosystems, and the beginning of a mass extinction due to climate change.

Thunberg and burgeoning groups of other climate activists are responding to a drumroll of news of a destabilised global climate. According to the scientific report submitted to the UN, the last five years are on track to be the warmest ever recorded; higher carbon dioxide has made the ocean 26% more acidic; the four lowest levels of winter sea-ice were recorded in the last five years; and heatwaves and cyclones have become more common and more deadly. A short list of implications for humanity is greater food insecurity in the face of heat, drought, and declining crop yields; greater exposure to heatwaves causing illness and decreased productivity; and decreases in GDP, particularly for poorer and warmer countries. None of this accounts for the risk of catastrophic climate change, which could happen if certain tipping points are reached.

Faced with this growing science and growing pressure from the street, the UN secretary general called for leaders to come to the summit with far-reaching plans, not speeches.

What he, and we, got was, for the most part, slightly warmed-over policies. A few countries pledged to reach net-zero carbon by 2050, a bold stretch. Many others, including India, reiterated that they will meet their Paris Agreement pledges, sometimes with a few teasers thrown in (such as India’s statement we would increase renewable energy to 450GW, but with no date, and an intriguing proposal for a coalition on disaster resilient infrastructure). A sizeable minority, including the United States, Brazil, Japan and Australia, were simply no-shows. Thunberg is right: We are looking away.

Beneath this failure to act sit two equally true, but different, ways of understanding the climate problem.

The first is that climate change is an existential problem that threatens life on earth and ecosystems, and requires extraordinary measures. And the evidence is mounting that business as usual measures — an energy saving light bulb here, a few percentage points more renewable energy there — are not going to solve the problem. The UN secretary general is informed by this view when he calls on all countries to halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and go to net zero by 2050. Implicit in this view is that everyone needs to act with urgency.

By contrast, the second, closer to India’s historical view, is that while action is needed, agreeing on which countries need to act and how much — how to divide the carbon pie — is equally important. From this perspective, understandably, it is outrageous to ask a country like India, whose citizens use less than a tenth the amount of electricity on average than an American, to take equivalently strong measures to address climate change. From this perspective, climate existentialism is threatening, as it ramps up the pressure for poorer countries to take on equivalent obligations to richer countries, which may risk short-circuiting future development by curtailing energy use.

The tension between the two perspectives is heightened by the rise of nationalism in several countries. That the US, historically the largest emitter, is unwinding its domestic climate policies on the basis of tenuous arguments about its economic competitiveness lends weight to those concerned about how the pie will be divided.

When the governments of major countries like Brazil also express scepticism about climate change, it further lowers the incentive to act. This explains the lukewarm statements by India and China that they are fulfilling their existing pledges, and this should be quite enough. These divided perspectives place India in a particularly difficult place. As a poor country deeply vulnerable to climate change, we should be in the climate existentialism camp. But as a country with considerable future energy needs, we vociferously stress that the carbon pie has to be divided equitably.

In the meantime, India, as with most other countries, continues with business as usual policies. We add renewable energy, but also look to sign oil and gas contracts and attract investment in coal. In this, we are not dissimilar to other countries. But neither are we leaders. Reconciling climate existentialism and the fair division of the carbon pie is not easy. But it is not clear that India is really seeking the answer. Like everyone else, we, too, are looking away.

Navroz K Dubash is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research. This is the sixth article in a monthly op-ed series in the Hindustan Times entitled ‘Clearing the Air.’ The original article, which was posted on September 25, 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
Our clean air plan is a missed chance
Can India grow now and clean up later? No, it can’t
How to Avoid the Middle Income Trap

SHIBANI GHOSH DECONSTRUCTS THE EAC’S RECENT DECISION
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE RIGHTS ENERGY RESEARCH

The Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) for River Valley and Hydroelectric Projects of the Environment Ministry decided during its meeting held on 30 December, 2016, that it would not take cognisance of representations received from civil society groups during the final appraisal of a project proposal for grant of environmental clearance.

The minutes of the meeting recorded that many of these representations have ‘an anti-development attitude so that the projects are kept on hold or delayed. This has financial implications to the developers in particular and to the nation in general’. The EAC was of the opinion that once it was satisfied that the public consultation stage had been satisfactorily completed, receiving representations would mean reopening the process.

Recommendations of EACs, expert committees appointed by the Environment Ministry (currently there are 8 such committees), play a crucial role in the Ministry’s decision to clear a developmental/infrastructure project, and hence this latest decision raises a slew of questions, especially from the perspective of the civil society participation in the environmental clearance process.

In the interview below, we deconstruct what this move means in conversation with environmental lawyer and Fellow at CPR, Shibani Ghosh.

How does the latest decision of the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) of not entertaining ‘anti-development’ civil society representations reflect on the EAC?

The EACs’ primary role in the environmental clearance (EC) process is to give recommendations to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) on project proposals after considering the potential impacts of the project. Based on these recommendations, the MoEFCC either rejects the proposal or grants a clearance with conditions which would mitigate the impacts or compensate for the same.

The decision of the EAC for River Valley and Hydroelectric Projects is problematic for at least three reasons:

First, the EACs perform a very important role in the EC process, and their independence and objectivity are as crucial as the expertise they are expected to bring to the table. There are several design flaws in the EC process, one of the most critical being that the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the proposed project is paid for by the project proponent. As substantial information about the project and its potential impacts are provided by the project proponent, its accuracy, the assumptions made, and safeguards proposed require independent verification. However, from the minutes, it appears that the EAC for River Valley and Hydroelectric Projects has a bias against civil society groups, which also include project-affected persons, who are important stakeholders in the EC process. They may raise objections, provide alternative assessments, and highlight inaccuracies or falsities in the project proponent’s submissions. The EACs needs to keep an open mind to all stakeholders’ opinions.
Second, according to the EIA Notification 2006, the MoEFCC has to communicate all public responses to a proposed project it receives to the EACs. It is not supposed to assess the content of these representations or determine their appropriateness. That is the EACs’ function. If the EACs find that public representations are repetitive, do not raise new issues or are unsubstantiated, they have the discretion not to consider them, but they cannot delegate this function to the MoEFCC.
Third, EAC members are appointed because of their expertise and experience in areas relating to environmental impact assessment and environmental protection. Their role in the process is to provide an expert opinion on a proposed project, its impacts and possible mitigative measures to the MoEFCC. The financial implications of the process or any delay in approving a project should not be a relevant consideration for the EACs. Their neutrality is compromised if they sympathise with one stakeholder (the developer) but refuse to hear concerns of other stakeholders (the public).
What is the process of getting an Environmental Clearance? What kinds of projects require one?

The Central Government issued a Notification under the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 on 14 September, 2006 requiring certain categories of projects to obtain an EC prior to commencing any project work. This Notification is popularly referred to as the EIA Notification 2006 as EIA studies form an important part of the EC process.

The categories of projects that require a prior EC, listed in the Schedule to the EIA Notification, include thermal power projects, river valley power/irrigation projects, mining, industries, airports, highways, solid waste management projects, etc. Depending on the size and capacity of these projects, the EC is either sought from the MoEFCC or from the State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA), which is constituted by the Central Government in each state for this purpose.

The EC process begins with the project proponent submitting an application with relevant information about the proposed project to the relevant regulatory authority (the MoEFCC or the SEIAA). The next stage is the issuance of detailed and comprehensive Terms of Reference (ToRs) for the preparation of an EIA report by the project proponent. The EACs may intervene to amend standardised ToRs to address specific issues with regard to particular projects.

The draft EIA report prepared by the project proponent, based on the ToRs and other relevant documents, is then made available in the public domain (offices of local and regional authorities and official websites) for public consultation. Certain projects are exempt from the public consultation process, and these are listed in the EIA Notification. The outcome of the public consultation is sent to the project proponent who is expected to respond to the material concerns raised and finalise the draft EIA report.

The final EIA report, the outcome of the public consultation (including minutes and video recording of the hearing), and other relevant documents are then appraised by an EAC. The EAC is expected to undertake a detailed scrutiny of the documents and the project proponent’s presentation, and then recommend the proposal for grant (or rejection) of EC or recommend additional studies before making a final decision. Based on the EAC’s recommendations, the MoEFCC issues its final decision. The MoEFCC normally accepts these recommendations, but it could disagree and ask the EAC to reconsider its recommendations.

Why is public participation important in the EC process? How is civil society usually involved in the EC process, especially through the EAC?

Public participation is crucial in environmental decision making processes as it introduces a greater degree of legitimacy, transparency and accountability in the process and thus makes the outcome more acceptable. In the EC process, public consultation is important for at least three reasons:

First, it is only through the public consultation process that people can try to understand the actual nature of the proposed project and the extent of its potential impacts.
Second, persons likely to be affected, directly or indirectly, by a proposed project must have an opportunity to express their opinion and challenge the assumptions and assurances about the project, the nature and extent of its potential impacts, and the proposed safeguards.
Third, as the EIA studies for proposed projects are commissioned by project proponents, the comprehensiveness and accuracy of these studies need to be verified. The public can point out inaccuracies, inadequacies and misrepresentations in the studies either from their personal experience or knowledge of the area, or by relying on alternative assessments and studies by experts.
Public participation in the EC process is primarily during, but not limited to, the public consultation process. The public consultation process has two components: (1) public hearing/s held at the project site or in its close proximity to ascertain concerns of people; and (2) written responses from those with a plausible stake in the environmental aspects of the project. The public could continue to engage with the process later as well by writing to the relevant EAC and highlighting specific concerns. They may do so because: they were not effectively heard earlier; they have accessed material previously unavailable; or as the EAC has limited time to deliberate, public representations could draw the EAC’s attention to specific concerns.

Only the draft EIA report is available before the public consultation. The project proponent, while responding to material concerns raised during the public consultation¸ is supposed to finalise the EIA report. But the public does not get an opportunity to access the final EIA report and verify whether its concerns have been taken into account. It is the EAC which is expected to be the neutral arbiter with expertise to assess whether the public’s concerns have been adequately accounted for in the final project proposal. In the event that the project is being recommended for the clearance, the EAC has to include adequate mitigative or ameliorative measures in its recommendations, some of which may be required to assuage the public’s concerns.

What are the ramifications of the decision by the EAC of not considering public representations in the EC process?

The EAC’s decision is indeed very unfortunate, as the members are experts appointed to consider environmental and social ramifications of projects, and not the financial implications caused as a result of properly considering such ramifications. The ToRs of the EACs are silent on whether they can consider public representations sent to members directly or those sent after the formal public consultation stage is completed.

Till date EACs have been accepting these representations. In fact, previously the EAC for thermal and coal mining projects has expressed its concern that it was not getting enough time to consider the serious issues raised in the public representations as it was receiving them very late. Noting that it could not deny anyone the right to voice their concern, the EAC requested the MoEFCC to consider issuing guidelines that would require all stakeholders to submit objections at least a week before the EAC meeting.

In another meeting, the EAC decided that the project proponent had to respond to these public representations before the next EAC meeting, so that the EAC could consider the project proponent’s response and the MoEFCC comments on the response. It is clear that the EAC considered these public representations as valuable in its decision making process.

As the appointing agency, the MoEFCC could ask the EAC to reconsider its decision, or itself revise the EAC’s ToR to specifically require it to consider public representations. But neither may happen as the Environment Minister has reportedly told these experts that they should clear projects fast, and not compromise on ease of doing business.

NEW BLOG SERIES BY ACCOUNTABILITY INITIATIVE
HEALTH

Using data, this series analyses some areas where India’s public health system remains weak. What emerges is a stark picture of how government funding is yet to keep pace with challenges to service delivery of government healthcare providers.

India’s Stunted Progress On Child Health looks at the status of child malnutrition. Even today, Anganwadi Centres do not cover all children who require nutrition services: only 1 in 2 children received any service according to official data. A quarter of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) beneficiaries are malnourished, a number that has increased from 15 per cent in 2015 to 25 per cent in 2017, as per analysis by the Accountability Initiative. This shows that even as ICDS coverage is expanding to include those who need it most, malnutrition remains a problem among those that avail ICDS services.

The next blog unpacks the changing nature of disease profile in adults. Approximately 4 in 10 people in the country are outside the ‘normal’ range: 2 out of 10 are thin, and 2 out of 10 are overweight. A shift in the disease burden to non-communicable diseases comes against the backdrop of more people accessing private healthcare options due to an already weak public health system. These options are far costlier than government healthcare, and a large number of people have to shell out huge amounts of money, which pushes people further into poverty.

The final blog understands the current priorities of government spending and how it is disconnected from the realities of health and poverty. Given the increase in non-communicable diseases, specialists (surgeons, physicians, gynaecologists, and obstetricians) will be required with even greater urgency. As many as 6 out of 10 deaths in India are now a consequence of non-communicable diseases. The average hospitalisation cost in a private hospital is almost 4 times that of a public hospital in rural areas, and a little more than 4 times for urban areas. Meanwhile, funding for the National Health Mission (NHM), the Government of India’s largest health programme, has remained largely immobile from 2013-14 to 2016-17.

PART 8 OF A BLOG SERIES BY THE CENTRE FOR POLICY RESEARCH (CPR) AND PRAYAS (ENERGY GROUP)
ENERGY RESEARCH

The series is titled ‘Plugging in: Electricity consumption in Indian Homes’.

When and how do people use different household appliances in a day? This is an important question for electricity distribution companies that supply the electricity required to run these appliances. For instance, if the use of air-conditioners shoots up on a particularly hot summer afternoon, then the distribution company will have to buy additional electricity to meet the demand at that particular time. An equally important consideration for utilities and households is the electricity consumption of appliances in actual operating conditions, compared to the manufacturers’ claims made under laboratory conditions. In this post, we look at broad appliance usage patterns observed in India and briefly discuss new work on measuring the actual use of electricity in households.

Households’ use of appliances depends on a number of factors such as income, climate, and behavioural tendencies, among others. There is limited understanding of the household level use of different appliances in India and its variation across socio-economic conditions and geography. Studies that project India’s residential electricity consumption assume nation-wide, uniform usage hours based on few local load research studies. There is a wide variation between these usage hours’ assumptions as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Compilation of usage hours of appliances from different studies
Source: Prayas (Energy Group), Residential Electricity Consumption in India: What do we know? December 2016
The load research studies estimate appliance usage patterns based on household surveys and load analysis of residential feeders. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) under its capacity building programme commissioned about 30 such load research studies for public sector distribution companies all over India in 2015. However, these reports are not yet public, and a better understanding of appliance ownership and usage remains partial.

While surveys provide relatively low cost means to gather insights into various aspects like appliance ownership and purchase patterns, accuracy of information on actual electricity consumption can be limited. This is because of two key reasons: (a) respondents may have difficulty in recalling the actual use of appliances; and (b) the actual power consumption of appliances may be different from the rated power consumption claimed by the manufacturer. In order to address this gap, we have initiated a project to install metering devices in a sample of households to measure electricity consumption every minute and send the data to a central server. These devices will measure the aggregate household electricity consumption and consumption from selected key appliances. We have started with Pune and will eventually extend to other urban, semi-urban, and rural areas in India. Daily (anonymous) consumption patterns recorded by these meters will be periodically updated on a publically accessible website. The project builds on our existing electricity supply monitoring initiative which measures and publishes the quality of electricity supply in about 300 locations across the country.

We briefly describe insights based on initial data recorded from selected households in Pune below.

People use different appliances at different times of the day. Load curves of households show the variation of electricity drawn by the household from the grid over the length of the day. Electricity distribution companies prefer a flatter load curve as it eases their supply operations. However, appliances like the air-conditioner, electric water-heater, and microwave oven can add significant peak demand. As the ownership of these appliances increase, it will be crucial for the distribution companies to understand the cumulative impact of their use on the load curve. Figure 2 shows the difference between the load curve of a household owning basic appliances and the load curve of a household owning high power appliances. Basic appliances include lighting, fans, and the refrigerator and high power appliances include an additional air-conditioner, electric-water heater and microwave oven.

Figure 2: Comparison of load curves between households with basic appliances with high power appliances like air-conditioner, electric water-heater, and microwave oven, in addition to basic appliances.
Source: Data recorded by Prayas, Energy Group
Refrigerators accounted for about 25% to 50% of the total electricity consumption of the selected households. This may change in the summer when ceiling fans, air-coolers and air-conditioners are used more. We found a significant variation in the actual electricity consumption of the refrigerators across homes. One 15-year old refrigerator consumed 4 times more electricity than a 3-year old 5-star refrigerator of same type and size. On an annual basis, this can mean the old refrigerator consumes about 1200 units (kWh) of electricity (contributing to the electricity bill with Rs. 6000-7000) compared to 300 units (about Rs. 1500-1800) by the new, efficient refrigerator. Load curves of both refrigerators (Figure 3) throw more light on this. The compressor, which consumes most of the electricity, is always on in the old refrigerator while it draws less power and periodically switches off in the new refrigerator, thus consuming less electricity. This may be because of the usage habits (frequent opening of the refrigerator door) or deteriorated performance of the working parts of the refrigerator.

​Figure 3: Load curves for refrigerators
Source: Data recorded by Prayas, Energy Group
Such insights can be useful across different stakeholder groups. They help distribution utilities understand the cumulative impact of high power appliances like air-conditioners and electric water-heaters on the load curve. Actual consumption data from a sample of appliances can also be used to design campaigns that highlight the magnitude of real impacts of energy efficiency on consumer electricity bills. The BEE, which is responsible for running the Standards and Labeling (S&L) programme, can use the data to modify the procedures and ratings to represent the actual consumption of appliances more accurately. Finally, manufacturers can use the data to understand the performance of their products under actual operating conditions.

In the next, final, post of this series, we examine the role of behavior in how appliances are used.

The post is authored by Aditya Chunekar at Prayas (Energy Group), Pune.

This blog series is also available on the Prayas website here.

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

Other posts in this series:

Electricity Consumption in Indian Homes
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
Role of human behaviour in driving electricity use