1 India

2 Kerala

3 Energy situation Domestic electricity consumption is growing at the rate of 21 % per year since There was almost a doubling of electricity in homes from 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

4 Energy consumption related to: Changing household Changing role of women Trans-boundary work migration Globalising economy and media

5 Changing household and family Joint to nuclear families Women with full responsibility for housework, yet entering work force Dowry pressure on women Consequences for consumption

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9 Kerala ethnoscape In Trivandrum, 40% of families have at least one member working outside Maintain an inside/outside identity Send money back Bring things back, which move through extended family networks

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17 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 (second edition). Freedom at Midnight. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, Ltd.

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

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20 TV 100 cable channels in Trivandrum New ideas about consumption and the good life Huge amounts of investment in television advertising (also directed at children)

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

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23 Sustainability: Southern perspectives Inevitable and allowable increases in energy consumption for basic services Growing middle classes interested in taking their place as global consumers

24 Implications for global approaches to energy sustainability Technology and knowledge transfer Reinforce local knowledge and existing sustainable practices Take on the main burden for energy reductions in the rich countries