Ashish Kothari penned the new article “India’s Energy Transition” for Meer. Read an excerpt below and the full piece here.
There are alternative pathways to human well-being, that also sustain the earth. These include decentralised, community-managed RE and other relevant technologies such as passive solar construction. A recent report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water and Villgro Innovations Foundation found that these could potentially impact 37 million livelihoods in India’s agriculture and textile sectors. Not to mention the enormous health, ecological, and social benefits of replacing dirty energy, and the fact that DRE can quickly reach and be managed by communities and households. As mentioned above, some elements of the government’s energy transition plans do promote these, but they need to become the major plank, not an ‘add-on’ to mega-projects. Alternatives also include more comprehensive consideration of the full range of energy (not only electricity but also biomass, human power, passive solar, etc).
Equally if not more importantly, there are many options for regulating demand through regulations and behavioural change, and for redistribution of energy away from wasteful and luxury users (such as over-cooled malls and rich households with ACs in every room), to those who currently don’t have enough. A host of socio-cultural, economic, political transformations are needed, and already being demonstrated in alternative initiatives across the globe. But these are as yet small and scattered, requiring much greater civil society and governmental attention.
A very interesting process involving trade unions, environmental groups, feminist organisations and others produced climate justice charter for South Africa, but there is no similar process in India as yet. I can’t see the government undertaking or even backing it, so it is up to civil society organisations and people’s movements to consider doing something like this, and using it as an advocacy tool as also to guide their own ground-level actions. A recent report has several interesting ideas for such transition in South Asia, which can be used as one base to develop a more comprehensive, grounded, consultative strategy and action plan that has communities and civil society as key actors.
