Chanda sometimes wakes long before dawn to sweep her house and beat the husk off her rice. Now in her 70s, Chanda has long since lost her sight. The sound of her morning activities reverberates down the narrow, unpaved street of the Adivasi colony, through the mud brick walls of the homes stacked either side, waking her neighbours. Next door, Leena complains but is sympathetic. “Living without electricity is like being blind,” she says. “You move around your home and cook without being able to see. Even in the day it is the middle of the night.”
Ducking into the home that Leena shares with her husband, you quickly appreciate the analogy. Two beams support a low roof made from a blue tarpaulin and corrugated iron sheets. The windowless walls offer some protection from the winter cold and the monsoon rain. They also keep the daylight out. Leena cooks on three polished stones at the back of her house, balancing her pots over a small open fire that have long since blackened the ceiling. Even at noon with the wooden door wide open, her kitchen sinks into the gloom.
Leena’s mother once made castor oil to light the inside of her home. She gathered the small orange seeds from plants in the hills, crushed them and boiled the grounds, skimming off the oil to burn in a clay lamp. Today, like everyone else in the colony, Leena burns kerosene. Each Wednesday, she carries a half-litre plastic bottle to the market, a three-kilometre walk away, and buys enough fuel for the week. Each night, she lights it in a coopi, a lamp made from an old coconut oil tin.
This is the village of Goudaguda, nestled in a fertile valley amid the high plateaus of southern Odisha, India. More than half the population of 1,500 are Poraja Adivasis, an indigenous community who rank among India’s poorest and most marginalised people. For many like Leena, life without electricity is most keenly felt in the home at night, when the kerosene lamps are lit. The use of kerosene lamps in rural India is associated with the risk of domestic fire and respiratory infection, but nobody in Goudaguda describes the risks in these terms. Many Adivasi houses are built to accommodate the use of kerosene and to mitigate the perceived danger of burning it indoors. Lamps are often placed in a small alcove called a tobo that has been built specially into the wall. At night, these keep the coopi’s naked flame out of the reach of children and partially contain its noxious fumes.
The absence of electricity is also apparent during the day. Goudaguda’s agrarian economy revolves around manual and unmechanised work, with no electrical appliances to ease the labour. The grains of millet, maize and rice harvested on the valley floor, for example, are all husked and polished by hand. Of course, on special occasions people generate their own electricity. During the Hindu festival of Ganesh Chaturthi or the Poraja harvest festival of Pus Parab, the Adivasis hire a diesel generator from the nearest town, buying enough diesel to power a colony’s worth of coloured lights and run a sound system all night long.
Yet Goudaguda is not entirely unelectrified. Like elsewhere in Odisha, one of India’s poorest states, access to electricity here maps directly onto income and caste. In 1984, a line of wires and pylons first connected the homes of its richest families, the high caste Gouda farmers and traders who give the village its name, to the regional electricity grid.
Thirty years later, the supply of electricity is erratic and unreliable. But while the majority of Adivasi homes remain unconnected to the mains, Gouda homes have fans, televisions and plugs to charge mobile phones. More than these appliances, it is the simple electric lightbulb that makes energy inequality most visible to people here. Walking through the village at dusk, the light from Gouda homes can be seen from afar, spilling out over the threshold into the night.
In August 2012, I moved to Goudaguda with my wife and six-month-old son. Over five months, I recorded how access to electricity was tied up in the politics of village life. Before arriving here I had read studies, such as those published by the UK charity Practical Action, that proposed metrics for measuring poor people’s energy access. But I had come across few attempts to understand the social relationships that shaped people’s experience of energy poverty.
Many Adivasis here feel the lack of electricity in their homes prevents them from living a good or better life. Some blame the political and economic power of the Goudas for stymying their development. One day I accompanied Ballava, a soft, bespectacled Poraja man in his late 40s, to a paddy field where he wanted to put up a scarecrow. “Only when the Goudas and their sons die will we prosper,” he said, looking back to the village in which he had been born and the grove of mango trees opposite the colony where he had lived his whole life.
When my family and I left Goudaguda we bought solar-powered lanterns for Leena, Ballava and the others who had looked after us. Solar technology was increasingly common here. In neighbouring villages an Indian NGO had installed solar lantern charging stations and one of India’s largest mining companies had distributed solar lanterns as part of a corporate social responsibility campaign. The valley was also becoming a frontier market for companies selling branded solar lanterns as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to kerosene.
In January 2015, I returned to Goudaguda. Our solar lanterns had been welcome gifts. Yet neither here nor in the surrounding villages had they replaced the kerosene coopi. If the lanterns still worked, people were using them to supplement light from kerosene lamps at night, alongside candles and battery-powered torches.
Meanwhile, nobody imagined that access to solar-powered lighting had levelled energy inequalities. Instead, the solar lantern promised little but a second-class alternative to life on the grid.
Returning to the Poraja colony, I was surprised to see a line of wooden poles running down the middle of the street. Since my last visit to southern Odisha, a government-funded rural electrification programme was extending the regional electricity grid and connecting rural homes. But because Goudaguda was already part electrified, its Poraja colony had been deemed ineligible for the scheme.
With no immediate prospect of electrification, people had taken matters into their own hands. Ballava and others, I learned, had hunted down unused poles from across the valley and carried them home. If they could only show the government that they had poles the wires might follow, they hoped.
Any practical solution to the challenges of energy access must understand that energy poverty is a social relationship. In rural India, poor people’s expectations for grid-like standards of electricity are shaped by local histories of inequality and exclusion. In the Adivasi villages of southern Odisha, nobody thinks a kerosene lamp or a solar lantern is sufficient to illuminate a home. People living without electricity don’t just want to see in the dark, they want to live in light as others do.
Names have been changed
Jamie Cross is a senior lecturer in social anthropology and development at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India. He tweets at @jamiejcross.
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