What has the hanging of an 18th century English parson for forgery got to do with the much-needed policy response to the squeeze on energy supplies created by the war on Iran by America and Israel? Just one thing: the imperative of clarity, the startling insight that credit fraud invited capital punishment in 18th century England, serving as an added benefit.

Reverend William Dodd was a popular preacher of sermons to the London elite. He did not live a particularly parsimonious life and ran up debts he could not pay off with his own resources, and so forged a bond in the name of one of his students, a nobleman. The fraud was detected; he was caught and sentenced to death.

His many powerful friends petitioned the King to pardon him, and even roped in the services of Dr Samuel Johnson, a famous man of letters, who ghost-wrote petitions for him and even Rev Dodd’s sermons inside the prison.

People noticed that the quality of the good Reverend’s writings had improved dramatically after being sent to jail. Dr Johnson, keen to conceal the true reason, eagerly supplied an explanation, which his biographer Boswell, has recorded for posterity: Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

American Actions Trigger Energy Crisis

The energy crisis, in which the American/Israeli attack on Iran has plunged the world, with 20% of the world’s supplies of oil and gas being choked off at the Hormuz Strait, calls for a wonderful concentration of the mind at policymaking levels.

US President Donald Trump does not want to send US troops into Iran and get trapped in a prolonged war for which his voters have zero appetite, and so, he has left it to Iran to decide when to end the war.

Trump has been blowing hot and cold on how long the war would last. He said most of the war goals had been met, without specifying even once what these have been, and that the war could end soon. However, Iran is not obliging him.

It has been attacking the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar) that host American bases, with the attacks targeting sites far removed from the bases. Even if the war ends tomorrow, it would take a couple of weeks to restart oil and gas liquefaction that has been shut down, thanks to the inability to evacuate what has already been produced.

Imperatives For India

India imports well over 80% of its crude oil, upwards of 60% of its liquid petroleum gas (LPG) used as cooking gas, and 50% of its natural gas requirements. The supply disruption has already created a shortage of LPG for commercial establishments, and the poor, who do not have access to cooking gas connections and depend on mini-cylinders from the informal market.

The government has asked oil marketing companies to prioritise households for LPG supply. Natural gas supply for industrial use has been curtailed. Fertiliser companies that depend on gas as feedstock are shutting down for maintenance, far in advance of the normal schedule.

It is imperative that India reconfigure its fuel mix, moving away from imported hydrocarbons and towards domestic coal, and revise its fertiliser policy.

Here are three principal challenges that should not be avoided any longer. One, India should cook on electricity derived from domestic coal and renewables, not import-dependent LPG or natural gas. Two, for generating power and producing methane, India should undertake massive gasification of coal, preferably underground. And, three, the irrational demand for urea should be curtailed by removing the subsidy on the fertiliser, and partially offsetting the impact on the farmer with direct cash support.

Cooking with LPG or piped natural gas makes the elemental task of cooking food vulnerable to global price changes of oil and gas, geopolitical tensions and supply disruptions. This is entirely avoidable when electricity offers itself as a clean fuel with universal access, thanks to complete rural electrification, and primary dependence on domestically plentiful coal.

Political Will For 24/7 Power Supply

Modern induction stoves are highly energy efficient, twice as efficient as conventional gas stoves. Gas stoves produce a flame at the burner, heating the vessel on top, while more than half the heat generated by the flame escapes as radiant heat, raising temperatures and tempers inside kitchens. Conventional electrical heating coils, too, cook with radiant heat, as do modern infra-red heaters.

Induction cookers produce an electromagnetic field above the cooktop, creating eddies of electrical current in the walls of the vessel placed on top, provided it is made of iron, steel or other suitable materials. These electrical currents heat the cooking vessel and the food placed inside, with about 90% of the electrical energy used for induction of the magnetic field converted into heat inside the vessel.

Commercial eateries have already snapped up most induction cookers in the market, with the more vigilant households also joining the fray. There is a shortage of induction cookers at the moment in the country.

Aluminium, bell-metal and ceramic cooking vessels will not work with induction cooktops: only cookware made of magnetic materials will do. This is the only drawback with induction cooktops.

Can utilities supply electricity in a reliable, stable fashion to enable households to cook whenever they want? Power supply is still erratic in many parts of the country, but that is a function of populist tolerance of power theft and subsidy not paid for by the exchequer. Telecom in India is a reliable, profitable business, so will power generation and supply be, if the politician lets it.

How about the pollution from burning coal? Do we even have enough coal to meet the additional demand for cooking exclusively on electricity?

The Coal Conundrum

India has an estimated 400 billion tonnes of coal. India consumes about 1.2 billion tonnes of coal, with a sixth being imported. These imports represent policy failure.

There is no rational reason why the country with the world’s fourth or fifth largest deposits of coal should be importing coal. Once again, politics and the lack of ethics in the private sector are to blame.

The tendency for private mining companies to treat workers’ safety as God’s responsibility, and to ignore the national priority of using scarce coking coal only for coking coal requirements, led the government to nationalise, first, coking coal mines, and, after the first oil shock, all coal mines by 1973.

The state monopoly was inefficient, incapable of mining enough coal to meet the requirements of the economy. This led to a policy of allowing power, steel and cement makers to have captive coal mines to dig out for themselves the coal they could not buy from the state monopoly, Coal India Ltd.

Allegations of corruption in the allocation of such captive mines put all captive mines under disrepute and helped bring the UPA government down.

The NDA government asked the Supreme Court to cancel all 204 captive mine allocations, including those that were operational, had got all clearances and were ready to go. The Court obliged. Captive mining ceased, and coal imports increased.

What’s Stopping Development?

While state monopoly over coal mining was abolished by law in 2015, it took the government five years to announce the first auction of coal blocks for private mining.

Instead of offering blocks that had obtained environmental and forest clearances, and for which land acquisition had been done by the state, the government offered blocks to start mining, which the allottees would have to move heaven and earth.

The private sector mentality of cornering licences by hook, crook or excessive bids, and later finding a way out, led them to bid unviable amounts of revenue shares with the government. Many surrendered their blocks. Others took time to move heaven and earth. Coal production remains stunted way below the potential, although it has been going up year after year.

With the right set of policies, India can be more than self-sufficient in coal.

With the right investment in research and development, India should be able to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from coal-based generation, and use the carbon dioxide for producing assorted organic compounds, besides different forms of pure carbon, such as diamond, graphene, graphite, fullerenes and nano-tubes.

To move up from the lowest end of the low middle-income status where India stands now, India has to generate enough power to raise the per capita power consumption from half the global average today to at least the global average. Given global warming, climate control itself will demand considerable amounts of additional electricity generation. Cooking, when added to the mix, will hardly make a difference.

Coal gasification, as well as fertiliser pricing reform, is also a question of R&D, political vision and political courage. Just so that we are clear, what really constrains India’s growth and development.