What's It Like to Live Without Electricity? Ask an Indian Villager

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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)

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.)

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?

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.

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"

You can also ask any of the thousands of Amish.