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Environment
Rural electrification and structural transformation: A guar(anteed) bet?
Is large-scale electrification necessary for the structural transformation of rural economies? This article combines two natural experiments in India – an exogenous agricultural boom in the northwest of the country with the simultaneous nationwide roll-out of its rural electrification scheme – to shed light on this question. It shows that electrification significantly increased non-agricultural employment in villages where economic opportunity complemented infrastructure. When these complementary conditions were lacking, electrification had almost no discernible impact.
Nobel laureate William Nordhaus’ ideas for India
William Nordhaus has won a share of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contribution to climate economics. In this post, Dean Spears discusses Nordhaus’ work and its implications for India. He contends that India is even more climate-vulnerable than realised by the Nobel laureate’s quantitative model that describes the interplay between the economy and climate.
Understanding India’s energy and emissions future
India is an important player in global climate change mitigation, and it is crucial to understand its energy and emissions future. Projections for India’s 2030 CO2 emissions from energy range from 9% to 169% above 2012 levels – a small increase to well over a doubling in 18 years. Based on an interpretive review of seven studies, this article concludes that a doubling of CO2 emissions is a likely upper bound and that this trajectory is consistent with India’s Paris pledge
Financing scale-up of rooftop solar power via municipal bonds
While India’s solar power generation capacity has increased dramatically in recent years, the rate of deployment of rooftop solar is still insufficient to achieve the national targets. In this post, Goldar and Paul recommend the use of municipal bonds to support the scale-up of rooftop solar. Applying their proposed bond model to Surat and New Delhi, they illustrate how rooftop solar can become competitive and benefit different types of consumers in these cities.
Impact of groundwater accessibility on performance of firms
While labour laws and capital have been identified as key constraints to industrial growth, there is scant evidence on whether accessibility of vital natural resources, such as groundwater, also influences industrial performance.
Pollution Externalities and Health: A Study of Indian Rivers
In many developing countries, environmental quality remains low and policies to improve it have been inconsistently effective. This project conducts a case study of environmental policy, focussing on an unprecedented ruling by the Supreme Court of India, which targeted industrial pollution in the Ganga River.
Rural Electrification with Off-Grid Community Microgrids: An Impact Evaluation in Uttar Pradesh, India
This project assesses the socioeconomic effects of solar microgrids. The lack of access to electricity is a major obstacle to the socioeconomic development of more than a billion people.
Temperature and human capital in India
A large proportion of the population in India has agrarian livelihoods that remain climate-exposed. The number of hot days per year in the country are expected to double by the end of this century. This column shows that higher-than-normal temperatures in a particular year lead to a contemporaneous reduction in agricultural incomes, and large negative impacts on children’s human capital outcomes in the subsequent year.
Clearing the air: The effects of transparency on plant pollution emissions
Of the 20 cities in the world with the worst fine particulate air pollution, 13 are in India. If good information on who pollutes is available, then traditional environmental regulation can bring down emissions somewhat, but regulators may lack the will or resources to penalise every polluter. What more can government due to contain such widespread damages? This project measuring the effect of information disclosure on emissions in a large-scale plant-level randomised controlled trial in India. In collaboration with the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, it develops a star-rating programme that assigns plants to categories based on their recent air pollution emissions, which are either privately shared with the plant alone or publicly disclosed.
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