

What's It Like to Live Without Electricity? Ask an Indian Villager - Mz
http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-whats-it-like-to-live-without-electricity-ask-an-indian-villager/

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otakucode
I think it is very, very difficult to comprehend some things. Like the absence
of something which has been ubiquitous in your life. The intellectual idea
isn't hard to grasp, and you can even deduce other consequences from the idea,
but gaining a visceral (for lack of a better word.. maybe intuitive?)
understanding is far more difficult. I came to this belief when I was a
teenager and had just gotten into watching foreign films. I watched a film
called Hour of the Wolf by Ingmar Bergman. I was watching Bergman films
because I expected (from pop culture references) them to be crazy, abstract,
unpredictable, and impossible to grasp. They're really nothing like that, of
course, but I mention it so you'll understand my mindset.

Instead of being treated to lingering shots of cigarettes, portraits of tired
old women, and eggs breaking on chickens, I was actually treated with some
insight. It was entirely unexpected, and I imagine that it was not even
intentional on the part of Bergman (though if it was, bravo to him!), but I
had a very profound realization of what life must have been like before the
introduction of electric lights. The main character can't sleep, and huddles
around the light of a candle - a positively claustrophobic little area. Now, I
had been in circumstances of dark before. I was a Boy Scout and had been away
from ubiquitous lighting before. But it was always with the knowledge that I
could reach for a flashlight or lantern. I never had to consider that without
those things, if I were afraid of what might lie in the dark, I would be
forced to simply endure it and wait for dawn - hours away!

I am sure that I only tasted an inkling of what the subjective experience of
people in that situation is. But that experience sticks with me decades later.
It helped me realize that simply 'knowing' something intellectually can still
starve one of the full picture. It helped me realize how profoundly different
a life can be with only small changes to environment. It also was one of the
big things (along with the humor in The Seventh Seal which doubled me over and
which I did not expect) that drove me to become an avid fan of film. The
supra-lingual things that a skillfully made film can communicate never cease
to amaze me.

~~~
agumonkey
I would love for our societies to give us opportunities to re-live deeply
different situations such as this. Once our neighborhood electricity node went
down, usually it's just one building cut for 10-20 min, this time we knew it
would be longer. Lucky for us we had candles, but even then, my toilets had no
place to put a candle on, so I could barely pee while holding that burning
thing in one hand. Far less scary than being left in the wild in the dark but
still.

ps: I ended up picking a book and reading it by candlelight on my desk. I felt
sucked into a 17th century reality. Also, the warmth, short decay and
liveliness of a flame creates a very special ambiance.

~~~
PakG1
Out of curiosity (unless it wasn't a western-style toilet), why didn't you
just sit on the toilet to pee? When I get out of bed because of a need to pee,
and I don't want to turn on the lights because of how it could affect my
drowsiness, and thereby my ability to immediately fall back asleep, this is
what I do.

~~~
agumonkey
Can't tell, makes sense reading it, but while holding the candle I got stuck
thinking without electricity I can't even pee.

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usbreply
The article misses the point (or skirts it).

India has the resources to provide electricity to every village. The problem
is that politicians have created a system where there is little or no
incentive to do so.

Electricity is a heavily regulated sector. Power producers cannot charge a
fair price for electricity, instead they are required to comply with a complex
pricing structure that forces them to give electricity free to some people,
and below cost price to many others and recover the loss from a very small
percentage of their customers who pay several times the fair market price.

Villagers are one of the categories of people who get electricity free (or
subsidized, in some states). This is why nobody wants to bear the expense of
running power lines to the villages.

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suprgeek
Rampant Corruption, Gross Negligence, Terrible planning,.... you name a
dysfunction and the Indian Electricity distribution system has it.

A sample statistic - a while back there was a study on Transmission &
Distribution losses in the Power grid.

US - 6-7% T&D Loss

India - _25-30%_ (conservative)

Just think about that - 30% of power generated in India NEVER reaches the
intended consumer. A lot of it gets lost due to poor connectors, some of it is
stolen, some of it is "diverted" by cronies of the officials.

~~~
bobbles
I was in India for 5 weeks last year, it's extremely common for the Hotels to
just completely lose power, and have someone run off to start a generator (ie.
2-3 times a day)

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NaOH
The fall semester of my senior year of college was spent on a three-month
wilderness course. This was done in the southwestern United States. Over
90-plus days we slept outside, carrying all our supplies. The course was split
into four sections, and, as an example of the break from normal amenities,
only between sections was there a chance for a shower.

After that course, my spring semester was spent in Indonesia, in a part
considered third world. Despite being in the tropics, there was no air
conditioning. A shower meant pouring a hand bucket of cold water over myself.

I could go on about the comforts given up during this year, one which I
consider among my fondest. And I’ll admit there was an adjustment upon
returning to standard American living afterward.

Truth is, as great as that year was, and as distinct as it was from my usual
American-style living, I can’t imagine what the people described in the
article experience. As much as I enjoyed my time, I knew the conveniences I’d
sacrificed were only temporarily absent. On top of that, the health risks
these people have no choice but to accept are above and beyond what I
physically risked.

Worst, I think, is that these people probably have little reason for hope.

It’s all so unfathomable to me—their circumstances, the slow rate of
improvements, the amazing ways people endure under immense hardship.

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jpollock
Cooking is a very different problem to providing a light source, and providing
heat via electricity is very inefficient.

From what I remember, there have been several attempts to provide people in
those areas with efficient stoves, but they haven't been very successful.

A quick search turned up the following paper discussing the problem:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945541/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945541/)

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chocks
Interesting post, reminds me of a book that I read recently on similar topic -
"The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope"
([http://amzn.com/0061730335](http://amzn.com/0061730335))

~~~
mkertajaya
His Ted talks:
[http://www.ted.com/speakers/william_kamkwamba](http://www.ted.com/speakers/william_kamkwamba)

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mistermann
Does the relative progress of China in the last 20 years illustrate how these
are mostly problems of governance? Culture? Both? Something else? (Serious
question.)

~~~
IndianAstronaut
It is simply a lack of economic growth. China has had high economic growth
rates, usually over 8% a year, since 1979, when it liberalized its economy.

India liberalized its economy in 1992 during a crisis of payments. Since then
it has had modest growth rates, around 6%. Many reforms are heavily
constrained by its democratic government.

~~~
sumedh
I would say culture plays a bigger role, we have excess food grains rotting in
government warehouses yet lot of Indians die due to starvation. We simply do
not care about our fellow Indians.

~~~
IndianAstronaut
This isn't an issue of who cares for who. I don't think any country is going
to vary that much in who cares for others. China is the place where a 2 year
old girl was run over and no one stopped to help.

~~~
sumedh
Ahh yes the typical Indian attitude of look at the other guy who is worse than
me.

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mytochar
In the article, it talks about how they do everything by hand, literally by
hand, not using any tools.

Why don't they use livestock for their work? It seems ... inefficient. Other
countries didn't have electricity for a long, long time; but they still had
machines and assistance through livestock and others, what makes this place
different?

~~~
sumedh
Some people are so poor that they cannot even afford to keep livestock.

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rayiner
That 300 million people in Indianwithout electricity is surprising to me. I
thought it would be a lot less. The village in Bangladesh where my dad grew up
got electricity in the 1990's, and a paved road sometime around then too.

~~~
praneshp
Bangladesh is probably more crowded than India, but still much smaller in
terms of number of people :-).

All villages in India don't lack electricity. 83.3 crore people live in
villages in India [1]. That is 833 million, so 65% of people in villages have
electricity. But I'm sure that they live without 24 hours of electricity a
day.

That said, the electricity problem in India is ridiculous; a few years ago,
many cities in my home state of Tamil Nadu, long considered one of the more
prosperous states had power cuts ranging from 2-10 hours per day. The
government had simply eaten up the money meant to buy spare parts for
generators, among other reasons. I'm sure villages saw just 2 hours of power
per day. The worst part about this is that Tamil Nadu has a coal-powered, a
hydro-electric, and a nuclear power plant.

Then there are some states that are downright poor, I'd guess most of the 300
million in this article live in those states. Bad politicians, lack of
education, the resultant naxalism etc. combine to keep them poor.

[1]: [http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/about-70-per-cent-
indi...](http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/about-70-per-cent-indians-live-
in-rural-areas-census-report/article2230211.ece)

~~~
NeutronBoy
Even in major cities like Bangalore, all office buildings, hotels and the like
have their own UPS and generators, it's not unusual for them to kick in 2-3
times per day due to grid outages.

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sumedh
You dont even have to talk an Indian Villager, people living in metro cities
also experience 2-6 hours of power cuts.

When I moved from Mumbai which has 24 hrs of electricity to Pune with 3 hours
of power cuts ever day, couple of years back. The first thing that came to my
mind when I was sitting in the dark was that "so this is how it feels to live
in a third world country"

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brooklyndude
You can also ask any of the thousands of Amish.

