Letters

Easy target

Your report on the BELLE project was excellent (Down To Earth, May 31, 1993), even capturing the flavour of the complicated and intense behind-the-scene struggles that went on before our project finally bit the dust.

An ironic twist to our story is that the primary need of the project consortium was not to access funds from the US Agency for International Development's PACER project. Instead, the reason for approaching PACER was to obtain access to the foreign currency needed for the one-time importing of CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps) for the project. The project consortium offered to buy in rupees the CFLs just as soon as they cleared customs inspection.

Unfortunately, as we have described, this need to access foreign currency turned out to be the plan's Achilles' heel. It proved easy to attack the project on these grounds, even though they were spurious, as BELLE's long-term goal was indigenous production of CFLs for the Indian mass market. A leasing scheme, such as the one proposed for BELLE, would be necessary to make CFLs affordable to households of all income levels.

As we see it, the alternative to plans like BELLE is the business-as-usual approach of building new power plants without comparable investments in energy efficiency. Building power plants entails foreign exchange outlays -- typically, about 40 per cent -- that are far in excess of those needed for projects that conserve comparable amounts of energy through improvements in energy efficiency. Thus, aggressive implementation of energy efficiency will allow India to obtain the most benefits from social investments in new power plants.

ASHOK GADGIL
Berkeley, California

ANJALI SASTRY
Cambridge, Massachusetts ...

Revive BELLE

I read the article on the BELLE project (Down To Earth, May 31, 1993) with interest and would like to propose that the project be revived. However, the CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) technology mentioned in the article as consisting of a tubelight with transistorised ballast built into it has several disadvantages: It may be suitable for advanced countries, where the cost of energy is high and CFL costs are low, and because the CFL design is integral, should any part fail, the whole assembly would have to be thrown away -- a waste that we in India cannot afford.

We propose instead a CFL combination of separate parts so that the entire unit need not be replaced. The parts would be a patti or bracket, a tubelight of either 20 watts or 40 watts (because 10 watt tubes of good quality are not available in India), indigenously designed and manufactured electronic ballast and a reflector to improve lighting efficiency.

According to my calculations, if 5 lakh tubelights of the kind I have proposed are used, it would result in a saving of 2 MW. I have forwarded details of my proposal to the Union ministry of power because its officials appear to have felt slighted because the BELLE project was not submitted initially to them. ...

Will UNEP answer?

In the worldwide struggle to break the vicious circle of poverty and degraded environment, it is essential for the United Nations Environment Programme, which plays an important role in the exchange of information and knowledge, to provide clear answers to the following five questions:

1. What is the extent of threat (global and by country) caused by the poorest people, in the form of loss of biomass or any other conventional unit of measure?

2. What amount of funds has UNEP allocated towards this programme for this year and what is its total amount of estimated spending in 1993-94?

3. How exactly is UNEP's effort to eliminate extreme poverty planned to be integrated with existing efforts in individual countries?

4. What is the real objective of the UNEP campaign and where are the extremely poor to be settled, in a changed social hierarchy?

5. What is the time frame of the present campaign and by when does UNEP expect extreme poverty to be eliminated? Is there a phased plan based on locational priorities?...

Change human values

The Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders has concluded that measures to halt the headlong course of planetary destruction have proved inadequate. More than 300 delegates from 50 countries meeting earlier this year in Japan expressed their conviction that a radical change in human values is imperative and unless human beings give up greed, intolerance and insensitivity to nature, our living planet will continue to be depleted of the vital resources that sustain all kinds of life, including the life of essential elements such as air, water, land and mineral wealth....

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