Energy and development in a global and social

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

India

Kerala

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

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

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

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

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Consumption as development • Soap and the world bank • From frugality to performance

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

Ghandi on modernism and consumption The Mahatma was wholly opposed to those who argued India’s future lay in imitating the industrial and technological society of the West. India’s 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 India’s 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 didn’t 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.

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. 16