Energy and development in a global and social perspective

1
Energy and development in a global and social
perspective

• Kerala as a case
• Increasing consumption, limits on production
• What is behind increasing consumption?
• Family and gender
• New household technologies
• Media and consumption discourses

2
India
3
Kerala
4
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

5
Family and gender

• Matrilineality to patriliniality
• Joint to nuclear
• Work migration
• Dowry and pressure on women
• Modern housewife
• Convenience consumption

6
Technology scripts

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

7
S15
8
(No Transcript)
9
(No Transcript)
10
(No Transcript)
11
Opening of India

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

12
(No Transcript)
13
Consumption as development

• Soap and the world bank
• From frugality to performance

14
Commercial advertising

• 100 cable channels in Trivandrum
• Advertisement every 30 seconds
• Play on local themes but also on desire to be
  modern

15
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.
16
The Kerala model of development may be defined as
a long term strategy which enables a country or a
state or a region to achieve a higher physical
quality of life even at a low growth in
productive sectors and a low domestic income by
diverting the major share of its available
resources for the creation of infrastructure for
human resource development like education,
medical care, housing and sanitation, etc. The
conceptual definition of Kerala model of
development highlights four tenets 1. It
stipulates that economic growth is not a
pre-condition for the attainment of economic
development... 2. Socio-economic awareness of
the people may be a pre-condition of economic
awareness. The cultural upward mobility in a
region may further lead to economic upward
mobility. 3. The transfer of land resources from
landlords to tenants or agricultural labourers
may be a pre-condition for sustaining social
justice which, in turn, leads to economic justice
and prosperity. 4. Rapid investment in social
infrastructure like education, heal care,
housing, road and communication along with
productive infrastructure is a pre-condition for
development.