This paper explores energy access, energy poverty, and energy development as energy security concerns confronting Asia and the Pacific. Improved access to energy services is arguably the key defining characteristic of economic development.

This report investigates the sustainable energy opportunities and challenges in the region in relation to poverty reduction and development.

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) conducts nationwide household consumer expenditure surveys at regular intervals as part of its “rounds”, each round normally of a year’s duration.

India’s huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982–99.

India has witnessed high economic growth since the 1980s, and a reduction in the share of income poor, though the measured extent of this reduction varies, has been confirmed by different methods. Poverty, however, has multiple dimensions, hence this paper explores the improvement in other social deprivations.

From lighting in streets and in the home, to power for water pumping, cooking, and basic processing and communications, access to energy enables people to live better lives. It also transforms health-care provision – enabling vaccines to be refrigerated, implements to be sterilized and diagnostic equipment to be powered.

This report released by Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves indicates that two-thirds of Indian families till use solid fuel traditional stoves and will continue to do so over the next decade, leading to 875,000 premature and avoidable deaths annually from indoor air pollution.