Author: cprindia

After 16 months of the filing of an RTI application by Kanchi Kohli of the CPR-Namati Environment Justice Program, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) disclosed a copy of the ‘Report of the (Shailesh Nayak ) Committee to Review the Issues relating to the Coastal Regulation Zone, 2011’ to the CPR-Namati team in June 2016.

In a short conversation below, the members of the CPR-Namati Environment Justice Program analyse the implications of this report on coastal governance:

What are the key recommendations of the CRZ committee report, which was finally made public after 16 months of your filing the RTI?

There are a range of recommendations of the committee, which include special protection for CRZ 1 areas that are considered to be the most sensitive coastal areas with mangroves, coral reefs and nesting grounds of marine species. The report, however, suggests major changes for the regulation of CRZ II (built-up municipal areas), CRZ III (rural areas) and CRZ IV (12 nautical miles into the sea).

The proposals include devolution of powers to state government and union territory authorities, including their town and country planning departments. This is especially for those activities, which are not covered under the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification, 2006.

The recommendations also promote housing infrastructure and slum redevelopment activities in CRZ II and tourism in CRZ III areas based on town and country planning norms and other state regulations. There are also suggestions for allowing temporary tourism facilities in areas that have been so far considered as No Development Zones (NDZ).

Several of the recommendations have already been converted to amendments by the MoEFCC. One such case is the reclamation of the sea for the construction of coastal roads and other infrastructure projects. Our analysis comparing all the eight amendments (made since November 2014) with the Shailesh Nayak Committee report can be accessed here.

What is the impact of these amendments on coastal governance as well as your work?

The disclosure of the report along with other documents like the Ministry’s file notings and representations made to the committee is an important step to understand the demands of the state governments as well as the road map for coastal regulation in India.

The notification in question called Coastal Regulation Zone, Notification, 2011 has always been subject to piecemeal changes as and when demands for amendments have come in from various state governments. While it is important to understand and address the difficulties in implementing a law, the response should not lead to destabilising the law itself. We have highlighted some recommendations for improving CRZ related institutions in our report on CZMAs (Coastal Zone Management Authoriy). To build a vision of coastal governance, it would be constructive to involve various points of view, rather than hold conversations only with central ministries and governments of few coastal states.

Several of the recommendations of the committee have a direct bearing on how people live on the coast. Therefore leaving out this entire constituency from this conversation could set a negative precedence. Our program on environment justice has emphasised on the interactions between citizens and the state as being necessary for making, shaping, and implementation of environmental laws. The efforts to ensure the disclosure of the Shailesh Nayak committee report was one more attempt to encourage this principle.

Are there any further recommendations in the report that you plan to analyse?

One aspect which we will analyse is the representations made to the committee by different state governments, especially Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka. This will give us insights into the implementation challenges as perceived by the state governments and how they plan to implement CRZ and prioritise livelihood groups living on coasts like fishermen, farmers, traders, artisans or pastoralists. We also hope to understand how the committee has understood these submissions to frame their recommendations.

TAKING STOCK MID-WAY – ELECTION ADDA BY CPR

In March, CPR scholars launched the Election Adda, a space for debate and analysis on key issues that have dominated this election. From forecasting and evaluating pollster perspectives to dissecting trends and debating the big themes, this series offers important insights into the 2019 campaign.

In the video (above), ‘Taking Stock: A Mid Poll Evaluation of the 2019 Elections’, Rahul Verma moderates a discussion between Surjit Bhalla, Sunetra Choudhury, Dhananjai Joshi and Philip K Oldenburg as part of CPR’s Election Adda series to analyse possible scenarios post May 23. The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

In the run-up to the panel above, Yamini Aiyar and Rahul Verma discussed in another episode of Election Adda whether the 2019 election was going to usher a new party system in India. Watch here – ‘Elections 2019 and the Future of the Indian Party System’. In an article in the Firstpost, Rahul Verma again analyses the evolving party system in India drawing on his book Ideology and Identity, which he co-authored with Pradeep K Chhibber.

Other episodes of Election Adda include:

‘Dissecting Polls’ featuring Rahul Verma and Roshan Kishore, moderated by Yamini Aiyar, where they discuss who is leading the electoral race and by how much, and why this national election is unpredictable.
‘How to Win an Election’ featuring Abeer Kapoor and Oshin Lakahni, moderated by Rahul Verma, where they discuss Kapoor’s game, ‘The Poll: The Great Election Game’ and what goes into an Indian election campaign.
‘Modi and Millennials – who will India’s Young Voters Choose?’ featuring Vivan Marwaha and Snigdha Poonam, moderated by Rahul Verma, where they discuss the political outlook of young Indian voters.
FRAMING THE DEBATE

National Security vs Economic Issues

Rahul Verma and Pranav Gupta analyse the likely fortunes of the Congress in the national elections in this article in ThePrint. They elaborate on how the party has made attempts to ‘shift the narrative from just national security to jobs, farmers and corruption’ in its campaign. Highlighting that ‘the party has chosen a high-risk, high-reward strategy’, they add that ‘it may fall flat, but it can also bring windfall gains’.
Verma and Gupta also write in another article in ThePrint about how ‘post-Balakot, national security has become the lens through which voters are viewing the performance of the NDA government’. Using data from the pre-poll surveys by Lokniti-CSDS, they argue that given the heightened nationalistic sentiments among Indian voters, it makes sense for Narendra Modi and the BJP to campaign around issues of national security.
Neelanjan Sircar writes in the Hindustan Times, analysing how the Balakot air strike could help the current government in the national elections, especially in the seats BJP is contesting nationally as opposed to regionally, but that ultimately it won’t be a game changer. To establish his argument, Sircar draws on data from the 1999 national election, post-Kargil war, unpacking the differences and the parallels between then and now.
Rahul Verma writes in ThePrint about how the BJP was part of the electoral race even in the pre-Pulwama and Balakot scenario, and that the party’s position is likely to be further strengthened in the aftermath of the air strikes due to increased nationalistic sentiments among the voters. However, ‘if the BJP fails to capitalise on the momentum in its favour and the opposition manages to make the contest centre around economic issues, the 2019 elections would become wide-open with possibilities’, he adds.
On a different note, Ambassador Shyam Saran writes in The Indian Express about the need for political parties to engage in debate on national security issues, rather than making it a subject to score political points during elections. He stresses that ‘citizens have the right to hold their political leaders and governing institutions accountable. It is unacceptable to assert that questioning the armed forces or government is unpatriotic’.
In an interview with Bloomberg Quint, Neelanjan Sircar analyses the campaign of the Congress party, highlighting that it is important for Congress to leverage structural factors that exist in the economy such as unemployment and rural distress in the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where it is in direct contest with the BJP to wean away some of the votes.
Politics of Welfare & the Missing Questions in Election Season

Analysing the Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maan-dhan Yojana (PMSYMY), launched in March, 2019 by the BJP, Yamini Aiyar writes in the Hindustan Times that without a ‘clear vision, strategy and institutional architecture for delivering pensions,’ it was yet another scheme ‘designed to fail’. It was launched days before the election for this reason in a likely bid to woo voters, so that they voted on the ‘merits of the promise’ rather than performance.
In another article in the Hindustan Times, Aiyar analyses Rahul Gandhi’s promise of replacing the NITI Aayog with a ‘lean’ Planning Commission, writing that without addressing the political challenge of New Delhi’s inherent tendency to centralise power (vis-à-vis the States), Gandhi’s vision could remain trapped in the failings of the past. She highlights how instead of reshaping the federal compact, which was its stated mandate, NITI Aayog’s style of functioning led to further over centralisation and coercive federalism.
Shyam Saran writes in The Tribune about the need for an ecological civilisation to reverse the climate crises. Saran highlights that ‘this is election season in India but no political party even acknowledges the elemental challenges our country confronts, let alone chart out a path towards ecological sanity’. However, given that India is not yet fully ‘locked into a resource-intensive pattern of growth,’ the opportunity to exercise the right choices is still available to us before it is too late, he adds.
Navroz K Dubash writes in the Hindustan Times about how ‘formulating a serious approach to air quality plan remains a missed political opportunity’ in the midst of election season. Dubash highlights that the clean air plan ‘sets a target without a realistic roadmap, proposes a city-based approach that downplays regional effects, and adopts a something-for-everyone laundry list approach rather than prioritising action’.
Navroz K Dubash along with Shibani Ghosh wrote a book chapter in the book Re-forming India: The Nation Today edited by Niraja Gopal Jayal titled The Ecological Costs of Doing Business: Environment, Energy and Climate Change. In their chapter, Dubash and Ghosh assess the BJP government’s actions in the areas of environment, energy and climate change through i) examining if the government’s focus on reducing the cost of business has come at an environmental price; ii) analysing cases in which an environment and energy agenda was driven by political imperatives; and iii) exploring how the government is addressing big picture questions as well as conducting diplomacy in areas of climate change and energy.
In the same book mentioned above, Yamini Aiyar wrote a chapter titled Maximum Schemes, Minimum Welfare. In this chapter, she analyses the BJP government’s welfare policy and vision and actions taken to realise the promises it made. She writes that despite a powerful mandate to bring about structural transformation, the central government remained caught up in its own contradictions and misdiagnosis of the core challenge, resulting in the loss of a unique opportunity. ThePrint has carried an excerpt of the chapter.
Yamini Aiyar and Louise Tillin co-edited a special issue of the journal Seminar on India’s changing federalism. In an introductory article titled The Problem, they set the context through an overview of changes in the political, fiscal, institutional landscape of India, including the dismantling of the Planning Commission, creation of the NITI Aayog and the GST Council. The entire issue will be available online next month.
In an interview with CNBC TV18, Rahul Verma analyses the BJP manifesto, comparing it with that of the Congress, highlighting that ‘manifestos aren’t written to reach voters directly. These are messages to party cadres on which they’re going to mobilise voters’. Verma adds that while the Congress manifesto was a ‘thought-out’ manifesto on development, agriculture and economic issues, the BJP manifesto seems ‘hurriedly prepared’ and was an ‘ideological’ manifesto. In another interview on CNBC TV18, Verma says that despite the details, the Congress manifesto does not succeed in providing a ‘vision for India’ the way BJP did in 2014.
POLLING TRENDS, VOTER TURNOUT & THE ‘MODI WAVE’

Watch the video of the CPR-Lokniti CSDS Discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’ as part of the ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ Series. The first discussion brought together psephologists and pollsters including Sanjay Kumar, Yashwant Deshmukh and Pradeep Bhandari, who broke down exactly what goes into making an election poll.
Watch the video of the second discussion of the ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ Series that brought together journalists and analysts from print, TV and online media to discuss the intricacies involved behind the consumption of poll numbers on their platforms and their dissemination. The panelists included Rajdeep Sardesai, Surjit S Bhalla and Saurabh Dwivedi. Both these discussions were moderated by Rahul Verma.
Rahul Verma writes in Firstpost, analysing data from the second wave of the National Trust Survey conducted by Firstpost-IPSOS, highlighting that if Indians choose to vote for their Prime Minister instead of their Members of Parliament, then the electoral wind is in favour of the BJP. Verma stresses that in such a scenario, ‘the Congress must avoid a direct leadership battle vis-à-vis Modi and make efforts to divert the election discourse to economic concerns of Indian voters’.
Rahul Verma writes in The Times of India about the effects of a change in voter turnout on the re-election chances of an incumbent party in India. Verma points out that those who didn’t turn out to vote may be key to the verdict in 2019, highlighting that if the trend of declining participation rates among the marginalised continues like in 2014, ‘we can bid farewell to the promise of the deepening of democracy’ in the country.
Neelanjan Sircar writes in the Hindustan Times about the impact of voter turnout on election results. Sircar uses data of turnout changes in three national elections, to analyse the ‘theory of turnout’ and gauge the impact of this on the chances of the BJP’s victory in 2019, calling it ‘a battle between party organisation and voter accountability’.
Rahul Verma, Pranav Gupta and Pradeep Chhibber write in ThePrint about factors that affect voter turnout on election day, analysing data of voter turnout for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls for all 1.3 lakh polling booths in Uttar Pradesh. Their analysis finds that simple changes such as making ‘smaller polling booths each of which is not co-located with other polling booths within one polling centre’ can increase the voter turnout by 5-7 percentage points.
Rahul Verma writes in Firstpost about how the results of the 2019 elections will decide the course of Dalit politics. Given the trust deficit created among Dalits for the BJP and the declining popularity of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Verma comments that it is not clear which political party will emerge as the claimant of Dalit votes.
Neelanjan Sircar writes in the Hindustan Times about the likely fortunes of the BJP in the 2019 national elections post its loss in the 3 Hindi belt states including Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, states that it had controlled for 15 years. Sircar’s analysis finds that the party ‘will have to manufacture another Modi wave if it is to return to power in 2019’.
REGIONAL PLAYERS

Uttar Pradesh: The Key to 2019?

Neelanjan Sircar writes in the Hindustan Times about how the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance in Uttar Pradesh will affect the BJP’s performance in the national election. Sircar uses data to prove that ‘the BJP’s performance is fundamentally a function of coordination/miscoordination effects in the SP-BSP coalition’.
Neelanjan Sircar writes in India Today about how ‘Uttar Pradesh will be the deciding factor in a second term for PM Modi’. Sircar highlights that ‘the BJP’s performance in UP may be the difference between a commanding electoral performance like 2014, scraping up alliance partners to form the government, or losing the election’.
In an interview with Bloomberg Quint, Neelanjan Sircar analyses who holds the edge in Uttar Pradesh Lok Sabha polls. Sircar highlights that ‘the big fight starts after the fourth phase of the elections’.
The Politics in Karnataka

Pranav Kuttaiah writes in The Wire analysing the crucial elements in the electoral arithmetic of North Karnataka. Kuttaiah highlights how ‘with factors like patronage politics and spoiler effects in play, North Karnataka looks to be headed for a tight electoral contest with potentially low voter turnouts’.
Pranav Kuttaiah writes in The Wire analysing the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) (JDS) alliance in South Karnataka. Kuttaiah highlights that while ‘the alliance will make many seats held by the BJP a closer fight, a winning seat could also turn into a close fight by extraneous circumstances’.

On Friday, July 5th 2019, Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman tabled the new government’s first budget. Against the backdrop of a resounding election mandate and an economic slowdown, expectations from this budget were high. Scholars at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) keenly watched the budget. We are delighted to share with you a compilation of analysis and commentary by CPR faculty.

Union Budget: A lost opportunity
Yamini Aiyar
In Hindustan Times, Aiyar calls the budget ‘a lost opportunity’, highlighting that the government has chosen an incrementalist approach rather than announcing radical structural reforms despite its mandate, making clear that Modi 2.0 is going to steer the familiar course. In particular, Aiyar argues that the government has failed to articulate a vision for rural economy, particularly agriculture, overlooking several fundamental issues such as a regressive subsidy regime, badly regulated markets and weak procurement infrastructure.

What the quest for a $5 trillion economy entails
Partha Mukhopadhyay
Partha Mukhopadhyay writes in Hindustan Times that ‘a first budget could have tried harder’ especially given the massive mandate the government received in the elections. Mukhopadhyay questions whether the inertia of the budgetary process sabotaged the claimed novelty of the budget, pointing out that budget shares of several older major schemes have been reduced, even as their absolute allocations have risen.

Budget 2019 Fails to Give Education the Radical Boost it Needs
Kiran Bhatty
Kiran Bhatty writes in TheWire about how the budget fails to give education the radical boost it needs. Bhatty sheds light on the National Education Policy – a policy that recognises correctly the critical juncture at which the sector is poised and the need to invest in it, but highlights that all its good intentions and recommendations are likely to come to naught if the finance ministry does not find a way of opening its purse strings.

Farm to health to education, Modi govt’s Budget has no clear vision for India’s social sector
Avani Kapur
Avani Kapur writes in ThePrint about how the budget missed an opportunity to articulate a comprehensive vision for the social sector and instead ‘reverted to the Narendra Modi government’s old avatar – a focus on infrastructure and a mission-mode model of meeting targets, this time for water’. In particular, against the backdrop of several health disasters faced by the country and the worrying results of NITI Aayog’s Health Index, Kapur writes that the budget needed to focus more on coordinated efforts and convergence across departments and ministries for health, education, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene), food and social security.

Budget 2019 Is Ambitious on Healthcare. But More Can Be Done
Avani Kapur and Ritwik Shukla
Avani Kapur and Ritwik Shukla write in TheWire that while the budget is ambitious on healthcare and has taken a few steps in the right direction, there is a need to intensify public expenditure on health. While budget allocations have increased compared to the interim budget focusing on quality of public health services, Kapur and Shukla write that more attention needs to be paid to convergence across ministries, such as MohHFW, MWCD, MJS, among others.

Budget 2019: Will Welfare Policy Under Modi 2.0 be About Entitlements or Empowerment?
Yamini Aiyar
In the run-up to the budget, Yamini Aiyar writes in TheWire about how the budget is an opportunity to chart the policy course for the next five years through bold welfare reforms, especially given the government’s historic mandate. Aiyar explains the challenges of financing welfare expansion while balancing the concerns of extensive fiscal slippage. She writes that the budget must address the relationship between income support and existing subsidies as well as the existing basket of welfare schemes.

[WATCH]: Yamini Aiyar analyses key takeaways from the Union Budget 2019
Yamini Aiyar
Yamini Aiyar participated in a panel of experts analysing key takeaways from the budget on NDTV. Aiyar sheds light on the challenge of strengthening the Indian manufacturing sector, the critical reforms that need to be undertaken in the agricultural sector, and the need for rational and leaner financing of social sector welfare schemes.

Budget’s flawed swadeshi objective
Shyam Saran
Ambassador Shyam Saran writes in the Business Standard about how the policy objective of import substitution in the budget is worrying. He highlights that the goal to make India a $5 trillion economy is only possible when the economy is a globalised one and will not be realised through protectionist policies. As tariffs on a range of imports are raised, Saran warns that the country runs the risk of slipping to the pre-1991 sub-optimal strategy of growth, based implicitly on import substitution and protected domestic production, pointing out that this will make Indian industry less competitive.

Budget Briefs by Accountability Initiative: Social Sector Analysis
Find the complete set of budget briefs by Accountability Initiative analysing trends in allocations, expenditures and outcomes of 10 social sector schemes of the Government of India in the areas of education, rural development, water and sanitation, health, and maternal and child nutrition.

Between March 15, 2017 and June 15, 2017, 207 projects that violated the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification applied for an environmental clearance. These applications have come as a result of a notification that the Environment Ministry had passed on March 14, 2017, which gives an opportunity to projects that have violated conditions of the EIA Notification to apply for a clearance within a period of six months, that is by September 15.

This notification was passed despite much criticism of the notification that was issued on May 10, 2016. Read Manju Menon and Kanchi Kohli’s comments on the draft notification here. They also wrote an opinion piece titled Environment Ministry to Bend Over Backwards to Whitelist Illicit Projects for The Wire.

The CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program has analysed these applications to see what are the kinds of geographical and sectorial spread of these violations and whether there are any trends emerging out of the applications that have come in till June 15, in its working paper From Prior to Post: Legalising Environmental Violations.

The Environment Ministry has already started looking at the applications through a Committee that has been set up for this. This Committee is headed by Dr S R Wate and had its first meeting on June 22, 2017. The Committee, in its first meeting, has examined ten applications. Out of these ten applications, the committee has already recommended seven for grant for a Terms of Reference subject to conditions, which means that these projects are eligible for environmental clearance.

This working paper would be updated with further analysis of these applications as well as of new ones, and will also track the progress of all applications.

The governing board of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and its chairman Eric Gonsalves are delighted to announce the selection of Yamini Aiyar as the new President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research. She will assume her responsibilities from 1 September, 2017.

Yamini Aiyar, currently a Senior Research fellow at CPR, has had a distinguished career in the field of social policy and development. Yamini’s research on social accountability, elementary education, decentralisation and administrative reforms has received both academic and popular recognition. She has published significant papers and contributed widely to public debate. At CPR, she founded the Accountability Initiative. Under her leadership, the Accountability Initiative pioneered a new approach to tracking public expenditures for social policy programmes including the country’s largest expenditure-tracking survey in elementary education.

Yamini is an alumnus of the London School of Economics, Cambridge University and St. Stephen’s college, New Delhi. She is a TED fellow and a founding member of the International Experts Panel of the Open Government Partnership. Yamini has also been a member of the World Economic Forum’s global council on good governance.

The CPR Board is pleased to have found a new President with exceptional leadership skills and integrity, who will take forward the Board’s commitment to excellence and academic freedom at CPR.

The CPR Board also takes this opportunity to thank the outgoing President Pratap Bhanu Mehta for his exemplary leadership of the last 13 years. During his tenure, Dr. Mehta infused CPR with renewed intellectual excitement and rigour, leading the institution to its current standing as one of India’s leading public policy think tanks.

As Yamini Aiyar takes over from Pratap Bhanu Mehta, CPR would like to thank all CPR’s partners, interlocutors, and funders who have supported the organisation over the years with engagement, advice, and support. Going forward, we will continue to count on you and are confident that CPR will scale new heights with your backing.

Dear Friends,

On 2nd November 2020, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) will complete 47 years. I write to you all, to express my sincere gratitude for your consistent and unflinching support over these four decades. It is this that emboldens us and pushes us to remain committed to our core values of intellectual rigour, strict non-partisanship and fierce independence.

In recent years, CPR has sought to step out of the ivory towers of policy research and deepen its public engagement. This, is in part a response to the growing polarisation of public discourse in India and across the globe. In equal measure it is a recognition that long-term policy change requires forging a new public consensus. The need for evidence-based, sober and coherent communication is urgent and pressing and CPR strives to make a small contribution in response to this challenge.

Against this backdrop, we are introducing a survey that helps us get to know you better and enables us to send you content that is tailored to your interests. Please do consider answering these questions (I promise it’ll take only a minute!), so we can have the latest analysis by CPR in your inbox. We will also be launching a brand new fortnightly newsletter on the 2nd. Do lookout for this and stay tuned for some exciting updates from us!

Once again, thank you all for your constant engagement with us. We look forward to more such platforms for debates and discussions.

With warmest thanks,

Yamini Aiyar,
President and Chief Executive,
Centre for Policy Research

The availability of good jobs on the scale that India requires is a significant challenge. Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and JustJobs Network (JJN) are launching a new partnership to generate new, innovative and fresh ideas to help tackle the nation’s jobs crisis.

This Jobs Initiative will include cutting-edge, applied research to find solutions to specific employment challenges in areas such as technology, migration and informality and differentiated impacts based on gender and age. As rapid transformations in these areas, coupled with urbanisation and climate change alter the way Indians live and work, this initiative will provide insights on how government policies can adapt to create jobs and support workers. This initiative will engage the government, the private sector, academia, and grassroots organisations to harvest good ideas and promote collaboration.

We expect this partnership with JJN, the only single-issue, applied research institution of its kind in India focusing solely on jobs, education/skills and labour market matching, to add significant value to CPR’s work on urbanisation, economic policy and technology; jointly, we look forward to effectively engaging in shaping the narrative and action on jobs in the country.

Over the last four decades, courts in India have developed a rich jurisprudence on environmental issues. The large body of environmental case-law reflects the judiciary’s predominant approach to environmental grievance redressal – directing regulatory institutions to take action against persistent violations and injustices, expanding the scope of environmental regulation and recommending special environmental adjudicatory mechanisms to make environmental justice more accessible. However, apart from a few judgments there has been less judicial attention, and resultant executive action, to strengthen existing structures and processes for effective redressal against administrative arbitrariness or inaction. This paper focuses on an often overlooked aspect of environmental grievance redressal, viz., the effectiveness of existing redressal forums. Such assessments of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) are already emerging. But, here the authors evaluate the effectiveness of a set of much older environmental redressal forums viz., the Appellate Authorities constituted under the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1974 (the Water Act) and the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1981 (Air Act) on two broad dimensions – ability to deliver good quality decisions and accessibility.

The large number of affordable homes to be built in the next few years has spurred the interest of cities, real estate developers, technology providers, amongst others. From an energy perspective, the unbuilt homes provide an important advantage. Because the bulk of low-income housing is yet to be constructed, the type of construction undertaken, the appliances they are designed for, and how they expend energy to cool and heat will shape the electricity consumption trajectories through the multi-decade lifetimes of these buildings. More so, new housing provides a physical setting for shaping preferences and practices around appliance purchase and electricity consumption that once set are not easily reversed. In this piece, we examine the energy services demanded within affordable housing, and identify which appliances households buy as their ability to consume increases.

We conducted a survey in 2017 in low-income houses in Rajkot, Gujarat to understand their electricity use patterns and the underlying drivers. This is part of our ongoing study on energy use in low-income urban households under the CapaCITIES project. Lighting, fans, televisions and fridges form majority of the appliance compositions in the affordable housing blocks.

Households use the services provided by these appliances most in the evening between 7-10 p.m., with usage of lighting and TV dominating. As shown in Figure 1, 59% of all households reported they used lighting in the previous evening and 33% of households watched television in that time slot. Fan usage peaked during the night, whereas a small number of fridges, on the other hand, were switched off during the night to save on the electricity bill.

These numbers indicate that not all households use lights in the evening, turn on fans while sleeping or always keep the fridge on. In discussions, some residents indicated that their work did not allow a ‘9 to 5’ schedule where they spent the evening at home; others said they did not turn on lights as the street and hallway lights were enough to illuminate the homes.

Figure 1: Proportion of households availing energy services by time of day
Source: Rajkot affordable housing energy survey (Khosla et al., in preparation)
To understand appliance use better, we categorised results according to the three types of government affordable housing: BSUP or Basic Services for the Urban Poor (built 2007 onwards); EWS or Economically Weaker Sections; and LIG or Low Income Groups housing (EWS and LIG are built under the Housing for All programme, 2015 onwards) (Figure 2). The categories broadly correlate to income – BSUP residents, on average, being the poorest in the sample, and LIG, the best off.

We find that fans are the most owned appliances across housing types, followed closely by televisions. Even in the lowest income BSUP homes, the rates of TV penetration are not dramatically different from the rates in higher income EWS and LIG homes. The difference in rates of appliance ownership between the three categories are most pronounced in fridges, where the LIG homes have the most fridges.

Figure 2: Appliance penetration rates in the affordable housing sample
Source: Rajkot affordable housing energy survey (Khosla et al., in preparation)
This trend is corroborated in Figure 3 which maps appliance ownership with a household’s overall assets or ability to consume, as measured by an asset index. Most homes, even in the early deciles of the asset index, own a fan, and this number increases to two fans or even more as a household’s assets increase. Fan ownership is followed by a TV, and the probability of owning a TV is quite high even though households may not own many other assets. TVs are more ubiquitous than coolers and fridges, in spite of the hot and dry climate and peak summer temperatures of the region. This result aligns with the literature that shows that over the past few decades, TV viewing has become the most important information and entertainment activities for middle class and increasingly for lower-income families. Fridges, on the other hand, follow a more conventional pattern where their ownership rises gradually as households get wealthier (with an increased probability of ownership around the 9th and 10th decile of the asset index).

Figure 3: Appliance ownership across the consumption asset index for the affordable housing sample
Source: Rajkot affordable housing energy survey (Khosla et al., in preparation)
It is clear that fans, televisions and fridges, form the bulk of appliances used within affordable housing units. These appliances, once bought, likely persist in households for a decade if not more, and can often then be passed on, second-hand, to other families. Further, because of the immense transition to affordable housing units that is ahead for India, the number of appliances, which will be bought for the first time is significant. As discussed in the previous piece of this series, appliances drive electricity consumption in homes and the adoption of energy efficient, or star rated, appliance models can significantly reduce this electricity use. We take a further look at the appliances used in the affordable housing sample to examine the number of appliances that are star-rated (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Percentage of star-rated appliance owned in the affordable housing sample
Source: Rajkot affordable housing energy survey (Khosla et al., in preparation)
Two striking insights emerge from Figure 4. First, while fans and TVs are by far the most ubiquitous appliances used within affordable housing, the number of rated appliances within these categories is minimal. Appliance shops in the vicinity of the affordable housing blocks corroborated that consumers had little awareness of energy savings from efficient fan and TVs, and that rated versions were only now entering the market. This presents a significant opportunity for scaling up the standards and ratings programme for fans and televisions, the energy savings from which are dramatic.

Second, the ratings programme for fridges is much more effective, as seen across the affordable housing types. Part of the reason for this is that BEE (Bureau of Energy Efficiency) has mandatory and stringent standards for frost-free refrigerators (as opposed to a voluntary labeling for ceiling fans). In all cases, there is large scope for increasing the efficiency of appliances through a rigorous ratcheting up of standards and labels. Compared to the lack of consumer awareness of TV and fan ratings, shop attendants indicated that consumers were aware of fridge ratings, often asked for input on savings, and were wary of costs of running energy intensive fridges. This is also seen in the data by a proportion of households that turn off their fridges at night to save costs.

As more formalised housing and rising incomes set to increase the use of energy intensive appliances, their usage patterns suggest the enormous scope for this transition to be an energy efficient one. In the next post of this series, we continue to examine energy intensive appliances, with a view from the National Capital Region, which has the highest residential electricity consumption in the country.

This piece is authored by Radhika Khosla and Ankit Bhardwaj at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

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.

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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
Electrifying the National Capital Region
Exploring the different uses of household appliances
Role of human behaviour in driving electricity use