Promises of a truth machine: deception and power in smart grids in India (original) (raw)
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Energy Research and Social Science (ERSS), 2019
How smart grids are understood and defined will influence the kinds of smart grids users will encounter in the future and their potential impacts. Practitioners and policymakers largely perceive smart grids as technological interventions. However, a number of social, financial and governmental interventions can also make grids smart, i.e., more efficient, more responsive, more inclusive and more robust. Drawing on qualitative research done using elite interviews, site visits and document analysis of eight micro-grids in India, this paper provides concrete examples of what could be understood as social, financial and governmental smartness, and in doing so, broadens the knowledge on smart grids beyond the technical understanding. This paper argues that social, financial and governmental interventions are central to 'smartness', and that multifaceted and relational sociotechnical approaches will build cheaper, just, more democratic and sustainable smart grids. The paper observes that smart grids are not conceived as smart grids but rather develop incrementally. An incremental approach, rather than pushing a premeditated set of ideas and technologies, reduces adoption of non-contextual interventions as well as unnecessary investments in new technologies. The paper recommends that policymakers and practitioners should understand and develop smart grids as sociotechnical and incremental grids.
Smart mischief: an attempt to demystify the Smart Cities craze in India
Environment and Urbanization
This paper attempts to demystify and deconstruct the current Smart Cities craze in India. It does so by refusing to be distracted by the discourses of the Smart Cities idea in general and of the Smart Cities Mission of the Government of India in particular. It focuses instead on the privatized physical spaces of urban inequality in India, specifically gated neighbourhoods and integrated townships. It argues that just as these privatized spaces have increased in size and complexity over time, their corresponding legitimizing ideologies have also evolved and become more sophisticated, to finally give birth to their newest avatar-Smart Cities. Seen in this light, Smart Cities appear less as a novel idea floated to guide the sustainable development of our future cities, and more as an ideological cover for the ongoing processes of neoliberal urbanization. The paper buttresses these arguments with an analysis of the design process of integrated township projects that I have been involved in, comparing the essential characteristics of these projects with the operational aspects and components of the Smart Cities Mission. KeywordS housing / Indian cities / inequality / integrated townships / Kolkata / neoliberal urbanization / Smart Cities I. deConStruCtIng A ConCeptuAl AppArAtuS In his insightful analysis of neoliberalism, David Harvey wrote that "for any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit". (1) Perhaps, apart from appealing to our "intuitions and instincts", a "conceptual apparatus" should also strive to reach a level where it can simultaneously shape, obfuscate and take over an entire way of thought, and channel it towards particular socioeconomic and class interests. Incidentally, Harvey has discussed this aspect too, not while discussing the "conceptual apparatus" but while elaborating the characteristics of counter-revolutionary theory, which he described as follows: "A theory which may or may not appear grounded in the reality it seeks to portray, but which obscures, be-clouds and generally obfuscates (either by design or accident) our ability to comprehend that reality. Such a theory is usually attractive and hence gains currency because Antarin Chakrabarty is State Coordination Manager at the Centre for urban and regional excellence (Cure), a nongovernmental organization based in delhi and bhubaneswar, India.
2019
The ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre carries out interdisciplinary global research uniting development studies with science and technology studies. Our pathways approach links theory, research methods and practice to highlight and open up the politics of sustainability. We focus on complex challenges like climate change, food systems, urbanisation and technology in which society and ecologies are entangled. Our work explores how to better understand these challenges and appreciate the range of potential responses to them.
Dissipated Energy: Indian Electric Power and the Politics of Blame
Contemporary South Asia, 2012
This article presents the Indian electricity sector as a case study of the evasion of responsibility in public policy. India’s electricity policy repeatedly fails to meet its own targets, and is universally lambasted as inadequate. The state appears aware of many of the reasons for these failures, yet policies have consistently failed to make effective corrections. Part of the explanation for this institutional and policy stasis lies in the pervasive shirking of responsibility by actors throughout the electricity sector. The sector is analyzed to explore the mechanisms through which responsibility is displaced, deflected, or dissipated. These mechanisms include ‘agency’, ‘presentational’, and ‘policy’ strategies, which are both pre-emptively and reactively deployed. Using these strategies, responsibility is shifted through (1) institutional architecture which formally delegates power to other actors, especially exploiting the ambiguity in federalism, sectoralism, privatization, and decentralization; (2) rhetorical displacement of blame onto other actors or ‘exogenous’ factors; and (3) everyday policy procedures and bureaucratic practices designed to distance officials from decision-making. By negating the requirement for institutional and analytical responsiveness, these evasions of responsibility perpetuate systemic failures and undermine the credibility of the Indian state.
Challenging the valley of death: A typology and case of smart grid demonstration projects in India
Developing countries like India are currently setting up several smart grid pilot and demonstration projects, under the National Smart Grid Mission to transform its energy sector. However, many of the promising pilot projects initiated so far have faced considerable difficulties in becoming successful commercial and business cases. This paper builds upon the literature on pilot and demonstration projects in the field of innovation studies and the sustainability transitions research. The paper studies five ongoing smart grid pilot projects in India namely: (1) Puducherry smart grid project; (2) CESC Mysore smart grid project; (3) Panipat smart grid project; (4) Tata Power smart grid project and (5) Sun Moksha smart grid project. The paper focuses on analyzing how some of the most promising Indian smart grid demonstration and pilot projects and the role they are playing in facilitating large-scale deployment of smart grids in India. In doing so, the paper makes two contributions. First, the paper integrates the literature on the role of pilot and demonstration projects in the innovation studies literature and the role of transnational linkages for the development of promising niches from the sustainability transitions research to explore ongoing smart grid pilot projects in India. Second, the paper provides a novel typology of demonstration projects in the context of developing countries by identifying three new types of demonstration projects namely (1) Indigenous learning projects; (2) Transnationally driven projects and (3) social value creation projects. Finally, the paper offers implications for future development of smart grids in India.
Contemporary South Asia , 2019
India's Smart Cities Mission (SCM) launched in 2015 has awarded 100 smart cities nationwide , proffering funds, compulsory corporate partnerships, and new configurations of urban governance. Perhaps most striking are the ten smart city bids from Northeast India, a region shaped unevenly by separatism, military occupation, and heavy economic dependency. Smart cities in the Northeast have been awarded with key exceptions to SCM rules. We take this to be a largely unprecedented experiment in digital urbanism in what Dunn and Cons (2014. "Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces." Antipode 46 (1): 92-109) label 'sensitive space'. Through a critical reading of the 10 smart city bids from the Northeast we make three arguments. First, despite the techno-utopian rhetoric, the primary aim of the SCM is integrating frontier space into national territory. Second, the extension of the SCM to the frontier accelerates the recalibration of the frontier into a market for corporate capital under the necessary stewardship of the Indian state, though the role for customary authorities in these arrangements is unclear. Third, with few other avenues for revenue generation and in response to perceptions of neglect, local authorities have used SCM bids to request conventional infrastructure rather than digitally networked projects.
Smart as (un)democratic? The making of a smart city imaginary in Kolkata, India
2021
'Smart' imaginaries have been enthusiastically embraced by urban planners and policymakers around the world. Indians are no exception. Between 2015-2018, following national government guidelines to use participatory and inclusive processes, many cities developed proposals for a smart city challenge. Successful proposals received financial and technical support from the national government. We examine the making of the smart city proposal submitted by New Town Kolkata (NTK). We ask how (un)democratic was the making of the proposal, along three aspects: distributive, participatory, and responsive. Based on an analysis of documents and interviews with policymakers and citizens, we find that NTK's smart city imaginary largely failed to be distributive. It rarely accounted for the specific needs of poorer and vulnerable citizens. City officials invested considerable effort in using participatory techniques, but citizen participation was tightly controlled through top-down design and practice of the techniques. The latter often facilitated one-way flow of information from the city administration to the citizens. The proposal was responsive to some citizens' voices, but only those belonging to the more affluent classes. A messy diversity of citizens' voices was thus closed down, as the city officials filtered and cherry-picked citizens' voices that were well-aligned with the official technocratic vision of 'global' smart urbanism. The paper shows how democracy can be put in the service of technocracy, within a rhetoric of citizen participation and social inclusion that embodies smart urbanism.
Power-Hungry: The State and the Troubled Transition in Indian Electricity
Indian Capitalism in Development, ed. Barbara Harriss-White and Judith Heyer, 2014
India’s pre-liberalization power policy was characterized by vast subsidies for irrigated agriculture, widespread theft, scarcity, and underinvestment. With regional variations, this description also fits the contemporary power sector. Electricity is critical for capital accumulation – making its comparative neglect in the study of development all the more egregious – and we would intuitively expect India’s contemporary pro-business state to alter policy to benefit ‘India Inc’. The power sector was indeed one of the first selected for reform in 1991, yet the pro-business policy transition has substantially failed. What can this failure tell us about the contemporary Indian state and its relationship with capitalist development?
Development Zones in Asia 10.5117/9789463726238, 2021
Imphal, the capital city of Manipur, was one of 100 cities awarded bids in India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM). The extension of the SCM to the borderland is an extension of zone-logic, enrolling the recalcitrant frontier into economic networks that cross India. Through a reading of Imphal’s smart city bid and implementation strategy, this chapter makes three main arguments. First, unlike zone-making projects in other parts of Asia where local elites, brokers, and/or local governments doggedly pursue the granting of zones, the extension of the SCM to Imphal has been driven more by obligation than desire. Second, the idea of an ‘open city’ is counter to the lived reality of surveillance, check-points, and limits on mobility and assembly that characterise life in the city. Third, Imphal’s meagre bid and lack of preparedness is barely relevant to the smart city award, as the geopolitical imperatives outweigh all other factors.
Urban Studies, 2021
This article aims to contribute to recent debates on the politics of smart grids by exploring their installation in low-income areas in Kingston (Jamaica) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). To date, much of this debate has focused on forms of smart city experiments, mostly in the Global North, while less attention has been given to the implementation of smart grids in cities characterised by high levels of urban insecurity and socio-spatial inequality. This article illustrates how, in both contexts, the installation of smart metering is used as a security device that embeds the promise of protecting infrastructure and revenue and navigating complex relations framed along lines of socioeconomic inequalities and urban sovereignty-here linked to configurations of state and non-state (criminal) territorial control and power. By unpacking the political workings of the smart grid within changing urban security contexts, including not only the rationalities that support its use but also the forms of resistance, contestation and socio-technical failure that emerge, the article argues for the importance of examining the conjunction between urban and infrastructural governance, including the reshaping of local power relations and spatial inequalities, through globally circulating devices.