Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (29 page)

Another immediate application of Aadhaar in the educational sector arises in the wake of fraud during entrance examinations, typified by the long-running Vyapam scam in the state of Madhya Pradesh. ‘Vyapam’ is a Hindi abbreviation for the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, an autonomous body responsible for conducting
various entrance examinations in the state. Undeserving students colluded with unscrupulous middlemen, government officials and politicians to obtain high ranks in these tests in exchange for kickbacks; one of the most common methods of cheating was what Nandan refers to as the ‘engine-and-bogey’ scam. A good student would sit in the middle—the ‘engine’—and on either side were the others—the ‘bogeys’ who would copy from him. How would Aadhaar help to eradicate such fraud? Nandan explains, ‘When you have an exam, you authenticate (students) using Aadhaar to ensure they are genuine candidates. And you don’t issue a seat till they enter the room and then you randomize and give them a seat. This is not rocket science, it’s simple. And people are getting killed on this.’
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The de-materialization of educational certificates as an actionable idea was first suggested in 2010; a National Academic Depository Bill was tabled in Parliament in 2011, and the current administration is expected to take this initiative forward.
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Just as stock depositories store share certificates in electronic form and have a regulator to oversee their functioning, so also a National Academic Depository will store electronic certificates; the role of the regulator in this case would be to verify the data contained in these certificates for accuracy. Similar organizations already exist; a subsidiary of the NSDL, together with NASSCOM, operates the National Skills Registry, designed to provide potential employers with verified information about jobseekers in the IT industry. Such a depository would make document-sharing easy while also guaranteeing the authenticity of the information it stores.

In the preceding diagram, we lay out a roadmap for the transformation of India’s education sector. New laws have ushered in an era of reform in education, and new innovations are flipping the way students learn in and out of the classroom. We must use these developments to address some of the most crucial problems bedevilling our education system. Since early childhood is the critical phase for learning, we advocate that the government ‘flip’ its focus, concentrating on early
education and liberalizing the higher education segment. Right now, the government is the highest authority when it comes to dictating which course must be taught at which level. What if the government took the radically different approach of letting institutions decide their own study plan for their students? In such a case, the government can create a user-rating system, along the lines of those used by services like Uber and eBay, to drive trust in educational providers. It is now the users who decide the rating and quality of a provider, rather than the bureaucracy.

An NIU can be created to simplify the engagement between government and students, managing, for example, the voucher system under the RTE Act to match schools and students. This NIU must also operate with the idea that education is no longer restricted to the standard classroom model; education should become a fluid, lifelong process, whether a student is learning from a teacher or from a game on a smartphone. To accommodate this transition, the government should move from being a funder to an enabler, creating the regulatory and policy environment that allows new educational models to flourish.

Wherever you look in India’s education system, you are confronted with issues that need urgent resolution. Millions of children never get any kind of formal schooling at all. Of those that do, the education they receive is often substandard. The government is pouring money into a public school system that is utterly inadequate to meet the challenges of educating India’s poorest and most deprived children; parents are turning in droves to the private education sector at great financial cost, even though the q uality of education offered by such institutions can vary. Our institutions of higher learning are churning out people with degrees who have no skills whatsoever, rendering them unfit for employment. Underqualified individuals are resorting to fraud to get a job out of sheer desperation.

There is no magic bullet that can cure education in India of all that ails it. The lack of a good education closes doors of opportunity for people, consigning them to the fringes of economic growth. The lost potential, both for them and for the nation, is immense and heartbreaking. Just as in the case of Aadhaar, such a fundamental
social problem needs a concerted effort across the spectrum of organizations—government, the private sector, NGOs and others. We need to implement innovative new ideas—many of them—and most of all we need to recognize the value that technology-based innovations can hold, not just to change the way students learn, but to radically alter our educational landscape.

We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.

—Thomas Alva Edison

LOHA SINGH MAKES for an unlikely film star, but this weathered, obscenity-spewing resident of Kanpur, located in India’s Hindi heartland, is the hero of the award-winning documentary
Katiyabaaz
. The title refers to his job as the Robin Hood of power, illegally rerouting electric wires from affl uent areas to localities without electricity. In a city where the average summer temperature is a sweltering 48 degrees Celsius and neighbourhoods are plagued by power cuts that last up to fifteen hours a day, residents are willing to pay this crack electricity thief—he handles live wires with his bare hands, and has even blown up a transformer so that he can reroute the wires inside—to ensure an uninterrupted power supply. In the meantime, the Kanpur Electricity Supply Company Limited (KESCO) is reeling under heavy losses thanks to increased demand, inadequate supply, unpaid bills, and of course, the thefts that Loha Singh and his ilk perpetrate. While
Katiyabaaz
is an enjoyable, thought-provoking watch, it’s also a primer to some of the biggest issues plaguing India’s energy sector.
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Energy resource management is such an essential component of India’s economic growth that Nandan devoted an entire chapter in
Imagining India
to understanding the origin and impact of India’s energy policies and evaluating the state of the field at the time. Since then, India has grown to become the world’s fourth-largest energy consumer, heavily reliant on foreign imports to meet its energy requirements and likely to become one of the most import-dependent countries in the world.
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Our energy economy continues to be largely dependent on fossil fuels—India is the world’s third-largest consumer of coal, for example, with all the attendant implications for environmental degradation, global warming and climate change.
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Heavy subsidies for the conventional energy sector discourage large-scale innovation into alternative energy methods, while draining the pockets of the state-run electricity distribution boards, leaving them unable to pay for the power consumers need. As we have mentioned earlier, global oil prices have been falling over the past few years, making this the perfect time to seriously rethink and re-architect India’s energy policies.

Inefficiencies in electricity distribution are grossly distorting the balance between energy production and consumption. Power losses due to dissipation from electric wires or theft, estimated as the Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) losses, are second only to China and the US. Dissipation losses arise due to the physical nature of the transmission network; they are largely unavoidable, and tend to be the same worldwide. It’s the theft component that is throwing off our numbers. When such losses are stacked up against the energy these three countries consume, it is clear that China and the US are operating at relatively low inefficiencies, whereas a staggering 30 per cent of India’s power is being siphoned off by the illegal tapping of power lines and the bypassing of electricity meters, often with the connivance of electricity board employees.
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Systems for metering electricity usage, billing and revenue collection are also weak and lead to further revenue losses for the public sector distribution boards. Some 300 million Indians continue to live without electricity, and 43 per
cent of rural India depends on kerosene for lighting up their homes.
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According to World Bank estimates, annual losses from India’s power sector could reach $27 billion as early as 2017.
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The alarming increase in carbon dioxide emissions and climate change are now global concerns, providing an impetus for the development of alternative energy sources. While we may argue about who is to blame, the fact remains that tropical regions such as the Indian subcontinent and Africa stand to become the worst hit unless immediate and urgent action is taken to invest in renewable energy sources. In this regard, India’s lack of a legacy infrastructure and low adoption of technology is actually an advantage; we are free to build the institutions that best meet the needs of our rapidly changing energy sector, and the successes and failures of other countries in the adoption of green energy technologies can act as a road map to guide us forward.

The energy grids of our future will look very different from the kind of energy grid that distributes electricity in India today. Instead of depending only on traditional modes of power generation, like coal, gas and to some extent nuclear power plants, all of which have a steady output, energy systems will also need to integrate intermittent energy produced from renewable resources such as hydroelectric power plants, wind turbines and solar panels, as well as from biofuels, geothermal, tidal and ocean thermal sources. 85 per cent of India’s rural households continue to depend on biofuels (firewood, cow dung) as their primary energy source, and these have been completely off the grid so far.
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They also bring with them a more insidious problem—the fumes generated by burning biofuels indoors can cause respiratory problems so much so that, according to the World Health Organization, India has the world’s highest rate of death due to chronic respiratory disease.

In the future, some consumers could also become generators, for instance, feeding excess power generated by a solar panel back into the system. Conventional transmission and distribution grids cannot handle the complexities of intermittent supply and reverse energy flow efficiently. The grids in operation today function as a one-way
street, with both electricity and information flowing from the power company to the consumer. The consumer, on the other hand, has little to no idea of how much their power consumption is until provided with a bill, nor any idea of which type of energy source—renewable or non-renewable—was used to generate the power they consume; the only power the consumer has over the system is to notify the utility in case of a power cut.

Increasing the efficiency and transparency of our power grids is possible only when they become smart grids, incorporating the power of technology and digital processes to change the energy landscape of our country. Such smart grids are two-way channels of communication, allowing energy utilities to integrate renewable energy sources into the system and monitor their networks more effectively while providing more information to consumers about their energy usage. By promoting the use of alternative energy sources as well as the more efficient usage of fossil fuels, smart grids can cut down the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and help to rein in the runaway problem of climate change. From Italy to the USA, countries around the world are embracing the smart-grid model with the dual goals of increasing operational efficiency and reducing the impact on the environment.
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While comprehensive data is not available, a 2011 study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) suggests that while the net investment needed to realize the vision of a smart grid will be nearly $500 million (over a twenty-year period), the benefits from such a power system will run into trillions, with a benefit-to-cost ratio of 2.8 to 6.
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What goes into the building of a smart grid? For power companies, sensors installed on power lines provide real-time information on the health of the network, allowing utilities to detect loads, congestion and shortfall, and marshal their resources more effectively to ensure a smooth and uninterrupted power supply. Faults can be repaired remotely, obviating the need for a technician to manually
do the job. Such sensors can also act as an early warning system in case of a power outage so that the problem can be rapidly identified and fixed remotely before it snowballs into a massive blackout like the ones that hit north India in 2012—the largest in recorded history.
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For consumers, smart meters can track electricity usage, transmitting information back to the power companies and to the consumers themselves. Consumers know exactly how much electricity they have been using, and this information can help prevent billing disputes. Utility companies can also start implementing time-of-day pricing schemes, charging customers a higher rate during times of peak load on the system. Pilot studies show that providing usage data to homeowners results in an average drop of 3–5 per cent in household electricity consumption.
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By allowing utilities to record usage patterns, smart meters also make it easier to detect theft and misuse. Italy has been a pioneer in the smart meter field; over 30 million smart meters have been brought into service since 2001, and 85 per cent of all Italian households now use smart meters to manage their electricity.
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The ability to monitor power sources in real time allows utilities to respond to demand-and-supply forces rapidly and with much greater accuracy. This makes it possible to integrate smaller and intermittent sources of power, such as wind turbines and rooftop solar panels, into the power supply system. In the future, smart grids can also accommodate the draw on energy by electric cars being recharged. Power utilities can use smart grids to improve their operational efficiency for maximal utilization of existing energy sources, as well as the integration of renewable energy sources into the system. Energy efficiency has in fact been dubbed the ‘fifth fuel’, and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has coined the term ‘negawatt’ to describe power saved through efficiency or conservation.
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Energy efficiency is being driven by innovations across multiple areas.
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Renewable energy sources, in particular solar energy, have boosted the available energy supply, and consumers can now act as small producers and storers, in effect ‘decentralizing’ the power
grid.
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Storage is getting cheaper—the batteries that power Tesla’s electric cars may soon be made available for the home as well.
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Smart systems are managing power consumption more efficiently. All of these factors are leading a sweeping transformation of the traditional energy grid structure, with resultant improvements in performance and savings. The importance of bringing about similar changes in India was commented upon by former union minister Jairam Ramesh, who emphasized that ‘chasing gigawatts alone is not enough and will not be sufficient for true energy transformation. What is required is a simultaneous push to ensure decentralized generation and distribution as well so that local communities who do not have access to electricity now get power in their homes.’
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India’s energy production patterns vary dramatically from state to state. Today, Gujarat can boast of an energy surplus, while Andhra Pradesh is struggling with a 12.1 per cent energy deficit. Smart grids can help to level the playing field, by drawing surplus power into the system and distributing it where needed in a planned manner, irrespective of the physical location of the power plant and the type of energy it’s using to generate electricity. Smart grids can also be used to bring India’s vast unmetered population, largely agricultural, on board, as well as help to identify which consumers are eligible for subsidized electricity and preventing fraud.

The preceding diagram lays out a road map towards building a smart power grid in India. Much of the groundwork for these ideas is contained in two reports, ‘IT Task Force Report for Power Sector’ (2002) and ‘Technology: Enabling the Transformation of Power Distribution in India’ (2008), an updated version of the 2002 report that was prepared by Infosys and the Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP).
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Nandan chaired the committee that prepared both reports, and, seven years later, they still offer a critical perspective on what technology can and cannot do for India’s power sector: