India @ Night

A satellite image of India at night

A few days back I came across this recent aerial photograph depicting the night time imagery over India. This picture tells so many tales and you look deeper it shows more than it hides. You can see prominent blobs of lights around area where the major cities are located. Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Calcutta. Surprising the area around Delhi is heavily electrified maybe because of the complete electrification of the surrounding states like Punjab and Haryana.

But most of the country lays shrouded in darkness with no access to electricity. Most of such regions are the poorest in the country, Orissa, Bihar and of course the North East. Its impossible to imagine that the electrification of these places would come about in the recent future, especially when the metros are developing an insatiable desire for power. The solution is not building multi million dollar power plant but have these communities develop their own power using solar and wind energy. Thats the only solution that scalable in the short run.

On the longer time horizon only nuclear energy can quench the needs of this developing nation but for that we must wait.

-Vibhanshu