ENERGY USE IN THE RURAL-AREAS OF INDIA - SETTING UP A RURAL ENERGY DATA-BASE

Aggregating and forecasting demand are crucial parts of energy plannin g. While a large number of energy consumption surveys have been conduc ted in the past in the rural energy sector of India, the lack of suffi cient data and its compilation, coupled with doubt about the quality o f data, has made the task extremely difficult. This paper summarizes o ur recent effort to compile, computerize and analyze data from 638 vil lage energy consumption surveys covering over 39,000 households, carri ed out by different organisations between 1985 and 1989. The details o f the level of information provided in the survey reports, area of sur vey, land use pattern, asset ownership, etc., of the collated studies are presented. Results based on the analysis of the energy consumption data compiled are then discussed. The national average for rural dome stic thermal energy consumption (excluding water and space heating) es timated through this work (629 kcal or 2.63 MJ per capita daily) is mu ch similar to the rural domestic thermal energy requirement assumed in most energy planning exercises in India in the past. The useful therm al energy consumption varies from 325 to 1065 kcal/cap/d (1.36-4.46 MJ /cap/d) in the East Coast Plain and Hills and the Eastern Himalayan Re gions, respectively. Reconfirming the predominance of firewood, the da ta reveals that the contribution of firewood to the domestic thermal e nergy consumption has remained at about 58% over the last three decade s; dungcake and agricultural residues contribute almost equally in the remaining share. At the national level, our estimates indicate that a t least 180 million tomes of firewood, 40 million tonnes of dungcakes and 30 million tonnes of agricultural residues were consumed in the ru ral sector for meeting the domestic thermal energy requirement in 1991 . The paper also compares the estimates with those based on other surv eys in India. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights r eserved.