I just returned from a visit to Chennai, one of the largest cities in Southern India, where my partner Anjali and I stayed with her family in a pretty nice apartment building. Besides eating some delicious dosai and uttapam, I came to understand one reason why India’s per-capita electricity consumption is 15 times less than that in the United States.
In India, every power outlet is governed by its own switch, and those switches are monitored with a careful eye. I was sternly instructed to turn switches off when I was done with them. If I vacated the bedroom without turning off the switch to the overhead light and the ceiling fan, I would get an immediate reprimand from the family cook. When I visited the aunt’s place across the hall and wanted to use the Internet, I had to start up the computer from dead because it had been switched to “Off” at the wall. No standby appliances vampiring electricity here.
This thrift extended even to the apartment gym, where I arrived with water bottle and towel to find the lights off and every cardio machine dark. To work out on the treadmill I switched its outlet on. When I finished I turned it off, as the sign next to the the machine instructed.
To contend with Chennai’s broiling heat, it isn’t as simple as pushing a thermostat button and pumping an entire big room or building full of cold air. Instead I turned on the A/C unit by the treadmill, and when I was done with the treadmill I switched it off. Then I headed to the dumbbell area and activated its resident A/C unit. None of this felt like any sort of imposition.
Somehow Indians have an instinct toward electricity conservation. Maybe it has to do with the country’s roots: Like many Indians, Anjali’s family is just three generations removed from its ancestral village, where one tended to the rice paddies and the bullock. Life was too hard to let anything go to waste.
Whatever the reason, it was refreshing to take a break from America’s thoughtless, wasteful use of power and to know that, halfway around the world, a billion people have found another way.
I wouldn’t say it is a power diet. We, Indians, and most of the Subcontinent never used the amount of energy people use in Europe, United States or other developed countries. Central air-conditioning or heating is absent here and we never felt the need of it either. Air-conditioners are becoming increasingly popular now but they are used just the way you used them, switch on when you need them. No offense but personally I do not understand the way Americans use energy; I just don’t understand why do they need so much energy since we are are doing perfectly fine using so less energy than them.
Hope you enjoyed your trip to India!!