There is an unbreakable relationship between income and the fuel used. In all developing nations, the poorest are the tribal people. They use dry sticks, leaves, and cow dung as their fuel. We can also see that nomadic people use less energy than those who have a settled way of life.

Modern agriculture uses more energy than the traditional method of farming. With the advent of the Agricultural Revolution, oxen and ploughs have been replaced by tractors; animals manure by synthetic chemical fertilizers and instead of Neem based pesticides we now use synthetic chemical pesticides. Besides, to transport local grain to the market we use fossil fuel driven vehicles.

All these changed ways seem to increase the consumption of fuels. This established the fact that as income rise, the consumption of fuels rises. This happens not only in villages, but also in towns and cities.

Everywhere people use electricity and electronic appliance and equipment to make their lives more comfortable and qualitatively better. This clearly leads to consumption of more electricity.

In our country too, the demand for energy is growing and the governments are making all efforts to meet the demand. With privatization, power generation is being boosted by setting up power plants in the private sector too. Efforts are on to take electricity to even the remote villages in the country. However, with increase in the power generation and use, there is bound to be environmental degradation.

The growing gap between demand and supply

In the cement industry, there is a 50% expenditure on energy and the sugar industry spends 7%. Scientists today are turning their attention to environment because of the pollution caused by acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer and the greenhouse gases. Our air is engulfed by pollutants and this worries the ecologists the most.

Generally speaking, the yardstick to measure development these days is the growth in urbanization, mechanization, and industrialization. From 1080 to 2001, our use of energy resources increased three times. As our population increased, our expenditure of energy also went up in the domestic, industrial and transport sectors.

In 1950, the average Indian used fifteen kilowatts of energy. It now stands at two hundred kilowatts.

In ten years, we increased our consumption of electricity by more than 12%. Today, there is growing shortage of petrol, kerosene, diesel of firewood in our country.

Petrol is subject to changes in prices at the international level, and our country is affected by it. However, prices of fuels like kerosene and gas are not subject to international variation in prices. They are supplied to consumers through fair price shops, with controls imposed on their quantity.

At present, there is shortage of power in our country as the gap between demand and supply of electricity is 10%. To bridge this gap the electricity supply authorities resort to dropping of voltage and power cuts.

While that is the situation on one hand, on the other we have yet another issue to tackle -20- 30% of the electricity we produce is lost during its distribution. There are two reasons for this loss, the unchecked theft of power and the losses in distribution.

Use of poor quality cables, inferior machines, over heating of equipment, overdrawing of power by consumers and inefficient management are as few other reasons for our worrisome power situation.