September 25th, 2007 
Deepak WILL INDIA SUFFER FROM AN ENERGY CRUNCH? Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. An assessment of how India is doing in terms of energy depends very much on how the question is framed. If we are to measure the current state against our past, we seem to be doing well indeed: the Planning Commission estimates that the total primary energy supply increased from 83 million tonne of oil equivalent (mtoe) in 1950-51 to 440 mtoe in 2001-02. Over this period, commercial energy supply increased even more significantly, from 22 mtoe to about 300 mtoe, while power generation went up from 5 billion Kw-hours to 515 billion Kw-hours. But we remain woefully constrained in terms of overall energy availability. Per capita energy consumption is a third and per capita electricity consumption a fifth, of the world average. While higher energy and electricity consumption is not an end in itself, availability of adequate and modern forms of energy is generally correlated with human and economic development. Worse still, the distribution of energy use in the country is highly skewed, with a wide disparity between the energy haves and have-nots. About a third of our total primary energy supply still comes from non-commercial sources (biomass, dung) that are used mostly in a traditional fashion-direct combustion-by an estimated two-thirds of the country’s population (mostly the rural poor) for their energy needs. The only worse performers are the poorer African nations and a few countries in Asia. And over 40 per cent of the households in India still do not have electricity. In terms of energy supply, we are fortunate to have fairly extensive coal resources. While detailed assessment of reserves is needed, there is a general consensus that coal will be a mainstay of the country’s energy future. But the difficulties in rapid increase in power generation capacity have become apparent in recent years. Oil and gas resources are much more limited, resulting in high dependency on imports (for oil, about 70 per cent of total use). The tightening global oil markets, driven by the United States’ enormous appetite and China’s growing demand, are likely to pose continuing problems for India-our oil consumption and imports saw an annual growth of over 5 per cent and 9 per cent, respectively, between 1990 and 2002. Looking forward, the major challenges for the Indian energy sector are three fold: (A)We need [...]
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