India

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India
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Kerala
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Energy situation

• Domestic electricity consumption is growing at
  the rate of 21 per year since 1995. There was
  almost a doubling of electricity in homes from
  1995-2000.
• The number of household customers growing at
  about 6 per year.
• 60 of electricity consumption in households
• Demand far exceeds supply of electricity.
  Scheduled blackouts daily, unscheduled often.
• Environmental and social concerns have virtually
  stopped hydropower.
• Other renewables expensive and not seen as
  realistic

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Energy consumption related to

• Changing household
• Changing role of women
• Trans-boundary work migration
• Globalising economy and media

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Changing household and family

• Joint to nuclear families
• Women with full responsibility for housework, yet
  entering work force
• Dowry pressure on women
• Consequences for consumption

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Kerala ethnoscape

• In Trivandrum, 40 of families have at least one
  member working outside
• Maintain an inside/outside identity
• Send money back
• Bring things back, which move through extended
  family networks

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Ghandi on modernism and consumption

• The Mahatma was wholly opposed to those who
  argued Indias future lay in imitating the
  industrial and technological society of the West.
  Indias salvation lay in unlearning what she
  has learnt in the past 50 years. He challenged
  almost all the Western ideals that had taken root
  in India His nightmare was a machine-dominated
  industrial society which would suck Indias
  villagers from the countryside into her blighted
  urban slums, sever their contact with the social
  unit that was their natural environment, destroy
  their ties of family and religion, all for the
  faceless, miserable existence of an industrial
  complex spewing out goods men didnt really need.
  He was not, as he was sometimes accused of
  doing, preaching a doctrine of poverty. Grinding
  poverty produced the moral degradation and the
  violence he loathed. But so, too, he argued did a
  surfeit of material goods. A people with full
  refrigerators, stuffed clothes cupboard, a car in
  every garage and a radio in every room, could be
  psychologically insecure and morally corrupt.
  Gandhi wanted man to find a just medium between
  debasing poverty and the heedless consumption of
  goods.

Source Lapierre, Dominique and Larry Collins.
1997 (second edition). Freedom at Midnight. New
Delhi Vikas Publishing House, Ltd.
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1991 Opening of India

• Removal of duties on imported goods
• Removal of luxury taxes
• Foreign investment and foreign businesses

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TV

• 100 cable channels in Trivandrum
• New ideas about consumption and the good life
• Huge amounts of investment in television
  advertising (also directed at children)

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Technology scripts

• New technologies bring scripts for change
• Refrigerators
• Buildings and air conditioning

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Sustainability Southern perspectives

• Inevitable and allowable increases in energy
  consumption for basic services
• Growing middle classes interested in taking their
  place as global consumers

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Implications for global approaches to energy
sustainability

• Technology and knowledge transfer
• Reinforce local knowledge and existing
  sustainable practices
• Take on the main burden for energy reductions in
  the rich countries