Despite the rapid developments in clean energy solutions, 1.1 billion people around the world still live without access to any form of electricity. We work on initiatives that use sustainable energy as a catalyst for socio-economic development of rural communities in a gender-inclusive manner. Innovations in technological solutions, business models, partnerships, and knowledge generation remain the cornerstones of our action-research.
Not many have looked into the causality between the percentage of a country’s population with energy access and the corresponding rise in its human development score
Much before urban India, the country's rural population had endorsed LED-based solar lighting. Initiatives such as LaBL share the credit of boosting consumer confidence in such products.
Bridging the electricity access gap has necessitated innovation in terms of product design, business models, service delivery systems, tariffs, financial instruments, and capacity building strategies
Evaluating the Ujjwala scheme through the lens of women empowerment and gender equality
TERI-JEEViKA create market for clean energy access at the bottom of the pyramid; light up 50,000 households through self-help groups in Bihar
Partnership with a local micro-finance institution helps take clean cooking and lighting technology into poor homes in a village in Bihar
The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) organised a regional workshop on Gender and Energy titled 'What drives the switch to modern energy?: Linkages and gender implications' in Raipur, Chhattisgarh on 12 October 2018.
The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), India, in collaboration with its partners, is hosting a regional conference on 'Accelerating Rural Development through Energy Access' in Patna on July 17 with the objective of sharing experiences around various interventions in the area of energy access with a view to scale them up in the state of Bihar.
TERI is hosting a workshop on 'Gender and Energy: Energy Access and Women's Changing Social Position' in Bengaluru under the aegis of Gender and Energy Network India (GENI), to promote the exchange of ideas and collaboration on the theme of gender inclusion in sustainable energy access.
TERI is empanelled by the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC), Government of India, for this programme. Under the TERI-ITEC programme, eight courses are being offered for the year 2017-18.
TERI is empanelled by the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC), Government of India, for this programme. Under the TERI-ITEC programme, eight courses are being offered for the year 2017-18.
In April 2018, the country achieved 100% village electrification—its first major milestone in this regard. This effectively means that now every village in the country has the requisite infrastructure and the network connectivity required to achieve the next major milestone, which is universal household electrification.
The vision and blueprint for electrifying the country was formulated by B R Ambedkar in early 1940s as the chairman of the Policy Committee on Public Works and Electric Power. It was established in September 1943 and, by February 1945, Dr Ambedkar and his team had studied the problems and opportunities for electricity development in India and pursued provinces and states to impart a national perspective to electricity development. While India is almost on its path to achieve complete electrification, it has taken 75 years from the year Dr Ambedkar formulated the plan to electrify India.
Dr Ajay Mathur, Director General of TERI is also a member of the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority and has been part of India's negotiating team in earlier editions of the United Nations-convened Conference of the Parties (COP). In this interview, Dr Mathur speaks about the expectations from the Katowice Climate Change Conference and how to tackle pollution.
India has, in just over a decade, achieved extraordinary success in extending electricity access through its national programme. About 1,25,000 villages have been electrified and 500 million people have got access to electricity. Village electrification has been completed. Household electrification under the Saubhagya scheme is expected to be completed by 2020, if not earlier.
While digital divide has become a common topic, discourse on universal energy access is still limited to practitioners and policy-makers, besides those who are at the receiving end. Unfortunately, access to clean energy-or the lack of it-has wide-ranging ramifications-from health to quality of life to education to lost opportunities for livelihood enhancements. India has made strides insofar as rural electrification and clean cooking energy is concerned, through programmes like Ujjwala, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana and Saubhagya.
The Union government launched the Saubhagya scheme in September 2017 to connect 40 million unelectrified households by March 2019. While the date is ambitious as such large-scale implementation will also face a number of challenges, Saubhagya should be credited with tackling many of the shortcomings of previous electrification programmes. The scheme has made provision for micro-lending for above poverty line households to meet connection costs, use of distributed solar for grid-inaccessible households, and expanding the scope of subsidy to cover wider beneficiary groups.
An exploration of the idea of gradually moving from subsidies on kerosene to investing in off-grid solar technologies for marginalised households
The issue of energy access and the associated willingness to pay for energy services has been extensively researched and studied globally as well as in India. To provide useful recommendations for future electricity-pricing debates, this study undertook a comprehensive literature review and stakeholder interviews to examine and quantify the existing evidence on the Willingness to Pay (WTP) for electricity supply in India. It compared these findings with the current electricity-pricing mechanisms to derive recommendations on future electricity pricing and subsidy policies.
Modern energy services are crucial to human well-being and to a country's economic development; and yet globally over 1.3 billion people are without access to electricity and 2.6 billion people are without clean cooking facilities. More than 95 per cent of these people are either in Sub-Saharan African or developing Asia and 84 per cent are in rural areas (International Energy Agency, 2015).
There is no definitive understanding of what energy services are entailed in 'access to energy' for a household. The Global Tracking Framework of SE4All1 provides a comprehensive definition of energy access-positing that a household in the basic 'tier' of energy access has 'task lighting and phone charging' and a 'manufactured solid-fuel cookstove with conformity, convenience, and adequacy'. India has 75 million households without access to electricity.2 The situation with regard to cooking energy is more overwhelming-166 million households depend on solid fuels3 for their cooking needs.
Lack of convenient, reliable, and affordable access to clean cookstoves risks the lives and livelihoods of millions of women in rural India. In the patriarchal rural society, cooking and collection of fuel are tasks typically performed by women (Dutta 2003). Household air pollution, primarily from inefficient cookstoves, leads to 1.04 million premature deaths in India annually (Balakrishnan, Cohen and Smith 2014), disproportionately affecting women and young children. Women spend a considerable amount of time, effort, and money collecting fuel wood (Sehjpal et al.
Improved biomass cookstoves projects are being prioritized, nationally and internationally, for development funding in India. While the Government of India’s National Biomass cookstoves Programme1 is the largest of its kind, there are many other national and regional improved cookstoves projects being implemented by multilateral and bilateral agencies.
We customize and disseminate clean technologies to facilitate the energy starved population in benefitting from clean and affordable solar lighting solutions. This is done by replacing kerosene/paraffin lanterns with solar lighting devices, thereby facilitating the provision of better illumination, and a kerosene smoke-free indoor environment for women.
We help prepare impact evaluation reports of the CSR initiatives for communities.
