The mirage of environment protection
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COMMENTS 
Do initiatives like NDTV Greenathon, which encouraged viewers to donate solar lanterns to villages without electricity, really help the environmental cause? Do they question the inequitable distribution of resources between big industry/urban consumers and rural India?
Using a potent mix of Bollywood glamour and live TV, the 24-hour NDTV Greenathon that took place on March 6 and 7, 2010, encouraged people to donate to The Energy Research Institute’s (TERI’s) Lighting a Billion Lives initiative to provide solar lanterns to villages with no access to electricity. The giving frenzy was interspersed with tips on how to ‘save the environment’.
But isn’t creating an event either to generate money for a cause or giving viewers simplistic ideas about how to save the environment a bit reductionist? It does not solve the problem, be it lack of electricity or the environmental crisis. In fact, it could actually be perpetuating it.
Initiatives like these minimise the potential for a real makeover; they almost legitimise the status quo. The Idea advertisements, for example, suggest cell phones as a remedy to the depletion of our forests, ignoring the mined materials used in the phones, the electricity consumed in their production and operation, and the issues involved in their disposal -- all direct causes of forest degradation.
Similarly, the Greenathon recognises the absence of electricity in rural India but fails to see it as the fallout of inequity in electricity distribution and consumption between Big Industry And Urban Consumers (BIAUC) and rural India. The solution offered does not question this imbalance; nor does it highlight its causes.
Suggestions and initiatives like ‘clean up your neighbourhood’, ‘plant more trees’, ‘say no to plastics’, also taken up by corporations these days are ambiguous as they too do not identify the source of the problem, rendering the solution superficial. By ignoring the fallout of consumption of goods, services and power, the Greenathon and other such initiatives might just prompt consumers to continue with their thoughtless consumption, with a little something given away to take care of the guilt.
Take the case of electricity. A finite amount is generated per day which is either consumed or lost in transmission and distribution. Electricity can be consumed if infrastructure brings it to the doorstep. This infrastructure is directed more at the BIAUC and less towards rural India. Because of lack of infrastructure in rural India there is more electricity for urbanites.
Even villages that do have electrical infrastructure get the short end of the stick, their requirements sacrificed for BIAUC use. Central Electricity Authority data for December 2009 shows that only eight states are able to provide 24-hour electricity for agriculture. Because Gujarat, for example, supplies electricity for eight hours staggered through the day and night, and Madhya Pradesh supplies three-phase power for 08:43 hours a day, and single phase for 02:33 hours a day, industry in these states does not suffer.
According to Mumbai Energy Alliance, the technical potential for energy conservation in Mumbai is 1,900 MKwh. This would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide generated and allow others to use the energy saved.
Although the Greenathon cannot do much about power infrastructure, a corollary to seeing the link between BIAUC energy usage and rural darkness is an obligation to reduce consumption, increase consumption efficiency and find ways to electrify rural areas. Instead, initiatives like the Greenathon sidestep the issue of electricity inequity by getting the BIAUC to sponsor solar lanterns, thereby solving only part of the problem.
Similarly, the Idea advertisements highlight forest depletion but ignore the concept of ‘Reduce, Reuse and Recycle’. They suggest that you ‘replace’ with a seemingly benign product which, on closer inspection, has a large ecological footprint.
Thus, a sort of social improvement and environment protection mirage is created.
This is not to say that renewable energy is not required in rural India. Decentralised renewable electricity empowers villages because production, distribution and consumption are handled by the consumer. Based on solar, wind or biomass, these grids are less carbon-intensive. And the proximity of their generation and consumption ensures almost zero transmission and distribution loss. As the entire village looks after the system, it also becomes a source of employment and technical enhancement.
Power-generation through decentralised grids makes people ‘masters of the switch’. Such systems immunise villages against load-shedding.
But renewable can only be one part of the rural electricity usage matrix. Renewable energy can power irrigation pump sets, agricultural implements, hospital equipment, fans in schools…
But it is important for people to view their own lifestyles as impeding if not actually causing distress to the so-called ‘have-nots’.
So are the Greenathons, the Idea advertisements and other such well-intentioned initiatives perpetuating the urban middle class’s blinkered vision of social imbalance and environmental problems?
The challenge is not to give more, or to replace a problem with another problem dressed up as a solution, but to consume less whilst giving more. There has to be a shift away from giving more so people can have more, to consuming less so that more can be shared.
(Samir Nazareth is a Nagpur-based journalist)
Infochange News & Features, March 2010