Role of Pakistan in India's Energy Security: An Issue Brief

By Maj Gen A K Chaturvedi (Retd)

India's energy security concerns. It sheds light on India's energy insecurity and explores its various dimensions, its nature and extent. It examines the role that trade, foreign and security policy should play in enhancing India's energy security. It is argued that the key challenge for India is to increase economic growth while at the same time keeping energy demands low. This is especially challenging with the transition from biomass to fossil fuels, the growth of the motorized private transport and rising incomes, aspirations and changing lifestyles. The book suggests that at this time there are strong arguments to lessen India's fossil fuel dependence and it argues for a need to engage with all the key sources of this dependence to implement a process of energy change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd
• Release date: Sep 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789382573746

Book preview

Role of Pakistan in India’s Energy Security

Section-1: Background

Introduction

Energy is vital for the economic growth of any nation. In this connection it needs to be appreciated that the energy is a vital input into production and therefore higher growth rate is feasible, only if sufficient energy is available to sustain the industrial production. The issue has a further knot and that is; its availability at a competitive price to make it economically viable. Therefore for a sustained economic growth availability of reliable energy at optimum economic rate is a prerequisite. This, in nutshell, is the essence of the Energy Security. Thus it can easily be concluded that the Energy security is the measure of the economic strength of a nation and also by implication a measure of the CNP.

Conceptual Framework - Energy Security is an important input among other inputs to ‘Comprehensive national power’ with linkages among various elements to the Comprehensive national power and also with the other external influencing factors. A conceptual framework outlining the various linkages in understanding the impact of the energy security on the comprehensive national power is as depicted in the Figure-1.1.

Figure-1.1

India is the fourth largest consumer of energy in the world after the United States of America (USA), People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russian Federation (Russia). However her energy resources are quite limited; especially for technologies which are in vogue. Therefore for a sustained economic development necessary for the growth of the country on the world power ladder, there is a need to optimise use of all available indigenous resources and supplement them with imports in such a way that the resultant relationship with the concerned countries is based on interdependence to reduce the Nation’s strategic vulnerability, give a boost to research and development of technologies for the energy bearing resources available in abundance within the country, enhance energy intensity, conserve energy as much as possible and finally evolve systems and procedures to co-ordinate conversion of energy bearing resources into power and its conveyance to desired destination within the envelope of minimum environmental degradation and affordable cost.

Overview of Energy

The total primary energy supply (both commercial and non-commercial) increased from 89.6x106 TOE (tonnes of oil equivalent) in 1953-54 to about 365x106 TOE in 1996-97. The share of non-commercial fuels has declined from 72 percent in 1953-54 to about 32 percent in 1996-97. Fuel wood accounts for nearly 65 percent of the total non-commercial energy consumed in the country. Of the indigenous primary commercial energy production, the relative share of oil and natural gas has increased from 1.2 percent in 1950-51 to 27.9 percent in 1996-97 (as compared to nearly 34 percent in 1989-90). The share of coal which was 98 percent in 1950-51 has declined to 67.7 percent in 1996-97. The changes in the pattern of primary energy supplies are shown in Table-