As a child, I observed my Mother would never throw down anything on the pavement. Like her, I carry home a banana skin, a used paper napkin if I cannot find a dustbin. Everyone thinks they are the only ones flinging out a tiny piece of uneaten apple out of the car window.
But when many hands do that, it becomes a smelly heap. (more…)
There is a brick wall between careers in the corporate and government worlds in India. Besides the IAS bridge, my peer group did not think of crossing thiswall. It raised a few eyebrows when I joined the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) as a consultant for Renewable Energy (RE) in May 2015. Reactions from friends varied from disbelief to wonderment. Here I was with family, moving from Berkeley to New Delhi to help lay the foundation of a sector with the audacious goal to reach ‘175 GW of renewable capacity by 2022’.
“Why is it so hard for our government to move the needle?” was a big question that drove me to the ‘other side’. I was particularly intrigued by the power sector. Even after 65+ years of independence and decades of government programs, ~300 million Indians did not have access to electricity in 2014 [1]. In fact, India saw the largest grid failure in the history of mankind in 2012 [2]. Is it sheer lack of capacity or willingness, is it corruption or is there more? In this article, I share the answers that I have found so far. (more…)
India’s rivers and aquifers are drying. ~70% of our food is produced from unsustainable groundwater irrigation, and groundwater is rapidly disappearing. This has serious implications for continued economic growth. On one hand, there is widespread public and political concern about India’s water. Recent campaigns by major spiritual leaders like Isha Foundation’s Rally for Rivers and the Art of Living’s River Rejuvenation campaigns have attracted massive support. There is clearly an economic argument for addressing India’s water crisis – it has been estimated that the Cauvery riots of 2016 resulted in a loss of Rs. 25,000 crores and the Chennai floods a loss of Rs 15,000 crores. Yet, on the other hand, the trajectory of the country toward a doomed water future seems to be accelerating, not slowing down.
When I was in IIT, some of us had been interviewed for a documentary– “I am 20”[1]– in 1967. I had then said, “Freedom in India means freedom to starve, go naked, be uneducated and die of hunger.” I was critical about the conditions in India and felt we had failed to achieve our goals. After graduation I set up an industry in plastic packaging. To me providing livelihoods was one of the key priorities, and at the end of the last century we employed 500 people.
Over the past 10 years I have been working with BIOME Environmental, an organization that looks at ways to promote sustainable living in a city – not only in theory but also in practice. The practice comes from the solutions that the group of BIOME engineers and architects offer – homes designed to keep energy requirements low, homes made of sun-dried mud blocks, homes which store and reuse rainwater, homes that treat wastewater and allow it to be reused within the site itself, etc.. I am a part of the Water team within BIOME, and this allows me the opportunity to travel and look at various aspects of water – the issues and solutions – around Bangalore and across the country. The water sources that capture my imagination and that of my team– for their beauty, human ingenuity, history, adventure and poetry – are not the springs, rivers, dams and lakes, but simple manmade structures that provide access to water – shallow open wells. (more…)
I am an IIT Bombay alumnus from the Energy Science Department. I rode a solar-powered electric bicycle for 7,424 km in 79 days. I started riding from IIT Bombay on 8th May 2016 and, for the next 79 days, rode across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh to raise solar awareness. I returned to IIT Bombay on the 25th July. (more…)
