On a mid-summer visit to Bihar two years back, I stopped for lunch at the best restaurant in Araria city. I had only a day to spend in this remote part of Bihar before heading off to the capital, Patna. One of the best ways to learn is to talk to people — with that in mind, I asked the chauffeur if he would like to have lunch with me. While talking about his life, the people, language and the villages we had visited earlier in the day, the electricity went off and came back at least three-four times in an hours' time. I asked him if this was routine. He said it was.
While the number of Indians without access to electricity (250M+) is gaining recognition, we must also keep in mind that even those with electricity most often face very poor supply. As a child, I used to go every year to Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh. The 6-8 hours of power cuts everyday would frustrate me. But I now realise that there are a large number of people, in the hundreds of millions, who receive electricity for less than 4 hours a day. Of course, basic access to electricity is very important. But just like we focus on quality healthcare and quality education, we should also focus on quality electricity access. Just like an empty hospital brings no benefit, electricity access only till before sunset has less practical use as well.
Much has been written about the Modi Government's claims about electrifying a certain number of villages and whether those numbers are made-up. That is completely missing the point, in my opinion. There is a systemic failure here, one that wasn't invented by the Modi government. The norms for declaring a village as 'electrified' as really low. A village with as few as 10% of the houses electrified can be declared 'electrified' by the Government. Such a low bar also results in equity issues, because one can easily imagine what kind of households get electricity first.
I wouldn't want to go into why this situation has come to be, except to point out that there is a typical in-group/out-group problem here. Those who do have access to electricity tend to misuse it so much that it becomes economically unviable for the government to extend access. For example, widespread theft results in T&D losses of 40-50% in many states. The extent of this problem can easily be understated. I have heard from peers coming from economically privileged backgrounds mention how they were party to power theft by their parents. In retrospect, one of the moments in life that I am most proud of is when I took a principled stand against power theft happening around me and was thereby able to prevent it. We must not be mute spectators!
However, this is a massive public goods problem that will take a lot of effort to solve. What do we do before that? How do we bring energy access to the millions without it? Thankfully, the high T&D losses make localised and renewable solutions cost-competitive! Ranging from solar lanterns to 40-50 kW plants, there are a whole host of commercial and scaleable options out there. Companies like d.light have gained significant traction and have provided access to tens of millions of people. The problem is too big for a handful of companies to handle and therefore, organisations such as the Rockefeller Foundation have taken on the task of creating an entire ecosystem of companies.
But what I want to come back to is the power of the individual - of you and me! After having moved to the west, I was appalled by the energy intensity of life here. The average Indian household consumes less than 20% of what an average British household does and less than 10% of what an average American or Canadian household does. Part of it is driven by need — colder countries need more energy! But part of it is availability. However, the complacency of affluence that I encountered among richer Indians, and now among people in the west, is distressing. Saving energy where it is not required is possibly the first step — even if of little practical use to an energy-starved Indian, it is a great moral signal! Sometimes, I go around in office switching off lights in unoccupied rooms.
More practical would be to support organisations that go out there and support electricity access. One way that I find quite convenient is to find an organisation on Milaap and donate a part of my income to it. The capital intensity of off-grid solutions can be quite discouraging, but crowdfunding might be a solution.
I go back to what I wrote during my Rhodes application. I said emphatically that 'equal opportunity for all' was my aspiration in life. Equal opportunity cannot even be imagined in the absence of unequal access to energy. Because climate crusaders risk inadvertently locking energy-starved people in Asia and Africa in a state of perennial deprivation, it is incumbent on us to both push back on that and also to seek a middle ground via commercial and scaleable renewable energy. For the 1.2 billion without electricity and the several more with poor quality access, the flickering bulb at night can be the light that guides them to join the rising tide of globalisation and prosperity.
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