The brutal Sonewane murder underlines again the need for effective policies for the cooking-fuel and energy needs of poor Indians. The roadmap for these has developed in terms of details but has been known in its main contours from the Fuel Policy Committee of the mid-1970s to the expert committee on an integrated energy policy of the Eleventh Plan. While it is true that,since the mid-1970s,poverty,severe and chronic malnutrition,and the reliance on non-commercial fuels has gone down,millions of people largely women and girl children collect fuel for cooking and lighting,at the expense of a lot they could do for themselves. In the process they severely undermine their health from fumes,as also create other sustainability issues. Clean energy is needed to literally sustain life.
If there is a focus on the problem,with a good beginning and dogged pursuit,solutions are possible,with large gains both immediately and from the elimination of the problem. Like in ending hunger,a lack of focus and giving in to short-term pressure not only wastes resources,but makes it almost impossible to solve the real problems and in fact creates problems,as the events of the last few days show.
We must provide clean cooking energy to all households within 10 years. Again,this is not much. My friend Kirit Parikh,who is very good at creating numbers from nowhere,says this only needs 55Mtoe (million tonnes of oil equivalent). This could be from liquefied petroleum gas (13Mtoe in the future),natural gas,biogas or kerosene. We will come to biogas later,but again thats not too strenuous. We would make the household have a claim for that with a ration system. We could use coupons,smart cards,or whatever is easiest,and empower them. Sure,some of that will be sold,since some will want cash and not fuel,but they will be better off.
The whole business of fast-growing plantations was thought of in the 1970s and is again highlighted by the energy expert committee. In fact it could be linked with NREGA. There are many other possibilities. When I was power minister,I wrote to each state asking it to implement,with GoI funds,7,500 MW of projectised mini-hydel electricity,which could be used to feed cooking energy to the poor at almost no running cost. We love to build photovoltaics at Rs 20 a unit since land costs money and solar panels eat land but even in Gujarat we have not built up the capacity of hydel power in that lovely structure,the Narmada Main Canal. Each
village could also have its own village plantations. The PC talks of wood-based gasification; and then theres the old reliable,dung-based biogas. A lot can be done.
But we entitle everybody for they are all poor,arent they? Then of the entitled,many dont need kerosene. So now they dont even go through the motions of delivering through the poor,and then collecting; the mafia take it directly from the pumps. As a regulator describes it,you dont see any kerosene stoves in towns,nor do you see anybody collecting anything from the outlets in jerry cans. It goes straight to
the other channel.
We are talking,now,of the small sum of Rs 12,000 crore. When I shout from my cottage Dont call a rural person poor by using an urban poverty line I worked out 30 years ago, I am asked by a powerful policy adviser to be more liberal whatever that means. A retired PSU chief says that the difference between the severely undernourished of 20 per cent and 70 per cent is an academic exercise. But the trouble is that when you dont do your sums,and focus your delivery architecture around that,Rs 12,000 crore gets siphoned away and the poor,severely malnourished girl still has to go to collect the twigs and damage her lungs with the smoke. We have the sacrifice of another honest Indian to remember,and to ensure it doesnt go in vain.
The writer,a former Union minister,is chairman,Institute of Rural Management,Anand,express@expressindia.com
