[chdir]

A related story : There's a mega mall in Chandigarh, India that wasn't given approval for a power connection for quite some time (politics / corruption).

Real estate is super expensive & the owners couldn't afford to sit idle and play games with the government so they decided to run the mall from morning till night on diesel generators. That's ~ $4500 of diesel each day, probably 6-8k litres. This is an example of a pollution source that's completely avoidable. I'm not sure for how many years this continued on.

What's worse is that there was no widespread public outrage. Why didn't people boycott the mall that's polluting their city and at the same time put pressure on the government to set things right ?

For a perspective, the city I'm talking about is a modern affluent city, close to Delhi (~ 160 miles). Home to a lot of politicians & celebrities, one of the most well planned cities in the world [1] & one of the cleanest in India [2]

[1] http://www.indiatimes.com/culture/travel/9-most-well-planned...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanest_cities_in_India

[3] http://www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130407/cth1.htm#5

[dkarapetyan]

Search for this quote. It is very relevant

> "Let me give you a lesson in practical politics. It is a mistake to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort."

[nononosisisi]

Why would people boycot the mall? Why not instead the disfunctional gov? By boycotting the mall you would only make it easier for the gov to ask for a bigger bribe.

[kamaal]

Why would anyone protest? India doesn't have enough electricity to waste on Malls and Movies theaters. Or big offices like tech parks in Bangalore!

What you have mentioned applies to every tech park in Bangalore, so should people now protest against their very source of employment?

[stickfigure]

India doesn't have enough electricity

There's something fundamentally broken about this statement, which suggests a deeper problem - why isn't the market for electricity working in India?

[djsumdog]

The grid in India is pretty broken. My dad had dreams of going back to India to retire, but on his last trip he told me housing was now super expensive, the pollution was still terrible, the air not fit to breath and the water still unsafe to drink.

In other countries we take a national grid for granted. In Europe, power can be bought and sold from country to country. India may be lacking in capacity, but even if they're not, the grid is fragile, unreliable and not a national one.

There are over a billion people living there too, in a land mass way smaller than their more populous neighbour to the north (and let's not forget all of China's trouble with pollution as well).

[Retric]

A huge chunk of china is basically uninhabitable.

http://www.china-mike.com/china-travel-tips/tourist-maps/chi...

PS: You can draw a strait line in China with 6% of the population on the larger half, and 94% of the population on the smaller half.

http://www.undertheraedar.com/2012/06/population-of-china.ht...

[HillaryBriss]

> You can draw a strait line in China with 6% of the population on the larger half, and 94% of the population on the smaller half.

America's most populous county, Los Angeles County, is approximately the same. The northeastern part is mostly very hot high desert or national forest land (severe building restrictions). By contrast, the southwestern part is coastal and much more suitable for human habitation.

http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/population/density/nei...

In general, Californians live in the third of the state along the Pacific coast.

[rapind]

You could probably do the same in Canada fwiw.

[tossaway1]

Technically you could draw such a straight line in any country.

[Retric]

True enough. Though Canada has more land than China and less than 3% of China's population. So, it's not nearly as big a deal.

[Noseshine]

Is it really uninhabitable? The territories in the north maybe too harsh, but with global warming helping too I think the southern half is quite alright, which is huge. It's all forest, lots of lakes, no lack of water and not too high, and no desert.

[frandroid]

Canada and China are roughly the same size.

[vacri]

Tibetless China is still a lot bigger than India and doesn't have that 94% property. The spirit of the GP's comment holds, I think.

[Retric]

China:

  ~94% of 1.357b = 1.28 billion population. 
  ~40% of 3.7 mill = 1.5 million square miles.
  = ~0.85 billion people per million square miles.

India

  1.252 billion people on
  1.269 million mi
  =~ 1 billion people per million square miles.

So, India is around 15% denser. Of course you can avoid the strait line cut and push China's density much higher, but the point is they are not that far off where people actually live.

[hiram112]

I'd be interested in knowing if all housing prices in India are going up or just for certain demographics. For example, I'd assume that there is a large burgeoning middle class based on tech / offshoring in places like Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. And also, there are probably a lot of newly minted millionaires that are involved in politics, finance, etc. - a lot of investment money has gone to India in the last 20 years.

But are the rents even increasing for the majority poor that live in the very cramped areas surrounding most cities? How about the rural population?

I ask because, while it makes sense that places like London, SF, and Vancouver would have huge property price increases due to increases in demand (foreign wealth, start-up success, etc.) it seems very disturbing that more and more areas where wages have simply not risen at all for decades are also going through prices increases.

For example, the rents in the Midwest city I come from have gone up about 50% in the last 7 or 8 years, though housing itself has not. Wages have actually gone down, adjusted for inflation.

[bahularora]

As far as I know real-estate prices in almost all of the cities are going up, even after adjusting inflation. Rents are low because of really high supply. Wages have gone down post inflation. Most people attribute the ever increasing prices of real-estate to illegal money/back economy, there are estimates that 23%-26% of Indian economy is unreported/black.

[rhinadash]

> a land mass way smaller than their more populous neighbour to the north

Is the huge amount part of the relatively uninhabited himalaya accounted for in that statement?

[sremani]

1. Most Indian power generation is Coal, there are hydel, and Nuclear is stuck in Gen2 (thanks to sanctions due to Nuke testing - the current Gen is 5)

2. There is scarcity of Coal, and Coal that is mined in India is high-soot

3. The demand for electricity outstrips Supply.

4. The supply never caught up with the demand because Transmission lines are owned by Government(state-level) and there is rampant theft

5. Because of theft and subsidies money is lost by government and the more the cost of generation the more loss the government will incur, so renewable is mostly costed out till recently.

There is hope though, Russia is building six nuclear power plants in India, more dams are coming online and investments in Renewables have increased.

Once distributed solar becomes affordable, the electricity owes in many parts of India would diminish or become tolerable.

[rahulsidhu]

I am afraid this picture is far from accurate. Power plants on the whole are running at a very low PLF for some time. Very cheap power is available in the short term markets[1]. The transmission system has also improved in the last two years and now prices are more or less uniform across the country[1].

Last mile distribution infrastructure is still a WIP in many places but the real problem is financial. Many distribution companies are owned by state govts. and unable to charge/recover for the electricity they distribute. This incentivizes them to procure/supply as little power as possible. Many states have now opted for a financial restructuring [2] and I expect demand will pick up sharply.

[1] http://www.vidyutpravah.in/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ujwal_DISCOM_Assurance_Yojana

[sremani]

#2 may be outdated. #3 can be debated, but there were brown-outs and black-outs during the summer.

Things have improved, but the pace is not something to write home about.

[intended]

Complaining about pace is moving the goal posts here, and yes power shortages are a lot scarcer.

I sell gensets in the southern states and the market is shrinking.

Additionally what's being missed in this entire chain is that the new CPCB norms were released a few years ago and all gensets sold in india now conform to it one way or the other.

To still add to this - most gensets don't run as much as they are able to. For a majority of sets they run very little in the span of years.

The OP gave an example where power was not given to a mall due to corruption, not lack of power.

[nimos]

I'm not sure there is really a scarcity of coal. Market prices are low by historical standards and India is currently looking at ways to expand coal exports because of overproduction and record stockpiles at power plants.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-05/world-s-bi...

[tn13]

India currently has sufficient electricity but the distribution system remains broken.

> why isn't the market for electricity working in India?

Electricity in India is a government monopoly. Even using a generator is illegal if you produce electricity above certain level. In very few cities government has allowed private players like Tata and Reliance to produce electricity and yet given them a complete monopoly over certain parts of the city.

Land acquisition in India is a big mess. People dont have proper property rights, clear land titles etc. It is illegal for a private company to buy land for commercial purposes if the land is not under particular zone. For example let us say I want to build my own power-lines over 100miles. I cant erect a pole in a farmland because erecting a poll is a commercial activity and the land is meant for farming only.

So the companies have to ask government to acquire land. It is a huge corrupt mess.

[geodel]

Electricity is unaffordable to vast mass of people without heavy subsidy. It is same with every infrastructure sector. One can say well phones are available and affordable to 1.1 billion Indian people. However ARPU for telecom companies is less than $2/month which might be one of the lowest in the world. Most companies are in heavy debt with not much to upgrade infrastructure as a result user count is getting very high but quality of network is getting lower.

Any infrastructure sector which requires heavy investment to produce but once there can be used by anyone will remain in bad shape. That is why India has many world class hospitals, 5-star hotels etc because they can be made exclusively available to those who can afford. While roads, piped water supply, sewage systems, public transport, education remain in terrible shape.

[nabla9]

Exploding demand and insufficient supply. Annual growth in electricity usage is around 6%.

Investment into electric infrastructure is not sufficient. Coal provides almost 3/4 of the electricity.

[chdir]

I think you are missing the point. The protest should be against polluting the city to power a non-necessary activity by not going to the mall.

AND if the government purposely delayed an electricity connection by months or years, then you should protest against them too. The above problem doesn't seem to be an issue of supply & demand of electricity, but more of a power tussle between the builder & authorities for possible kickbacks.

Related, it seems like India is almost power surplus according to these sources : [1] [2] [3]

[1] http://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/features/we-can-tell-th...

[2] "By the end of calendar year 2015, India has become power surplus country despite lower power tariffs" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=india+power+surplus

[kamaal]

>>The protest should be against polluting the city to power a non-necessary activity by not going to the mall.

Nearly every major set up runs on diesel generators, where all would you stop going?

These sort of protests, bans etc don't scale well.

[tn13]

That is not true. India has sufficient electricity to meet its needs besides Malls and Movies indeed something that people want given their explosive growth.

[Nano2rad]

India has only 2% electricity shortage.