This SpringerBrief reviews currently applied and potential solutions for improving the efficiency and quality of rural electricity supply in India, a major bottleneck for agricultural development. It provides background on the current state of supply and reviews recent and ongoing research and development projects. One selected project, designed and conducted by the authors, is outlined in detail. The research findings, project implementation, and evaluation are intended to provide development practitioners, policy makers, and applied researchers with experience from the field. At the core of this Brief is the integration of technical and social solutions, emphasizing the role of collective action, and the merits and demerits of small-scale, technically simple measures.

Currently 23 cities exceed the 10 million inhabitants' threshold. The number of world's megacities is expected to grow to 39 in 2025 with 32 of these in emerging economies. While today cities cater for over half of the world's population, they are facing ever increasing environmental problems. Whether or not an emerging megacity will be able to cope with expected climate change impacts and increased scarcity of natural or man-made resources depends on its capacity to change human behaviour in different areas of what a city constitutes. On-going research on various responses to anticipated climate change impacts on the emerging megacities aims to generate knowledge for an effective and feasible transition towards sustainable development. Where different disciplines and approaches seem to overwhelmingly agree is that mitigation and adaptation measures are urgently needed. This implies not only identifying available technological options but also exploring institutions - defined as "sets of rules" and governance structures, i.e. those "modes of organization" that are necessary to put rules into practice. Thus, in order to arrive at feasible mitigation and adaptation measures, technical solutions and social construction need to be combined. This Emerging megacities series presents findings of current inter- and trans- disciplinary research on different topics concerning the sustainable growth of these rapidly expanding cities.

This report focuses on the policies of electricity provision for irrigation and the cost of groundwater-based irrigation. The empirical ndings indicate that electricity regulation is unlikely to ful l the expectations of an allocation-e cient tari structure in the given political situation, leading to regulatory capture. The report's chronological approach reveals development paths that are also present in the current action situations. The ndings suggest that the involved properties of transactions inherent in the choices available to each actor are constitutive for understanding the unfolding of each potential and the realised development path. The economic conditions of dry-land agriculture and the costs of food provision render a shift towards a cost-based tari setting unlikely. The analysis at the level of electricity distribution and agricultural production systems indicates that although marginal costs of electricity supply are inexistent, the costs for the consequences of poor infrastructure incur heavy burdens on agricultural enterprises. The costs of electricity would exceed those for each of the other input factors of production. The absence of marginal costs has led to highly ine cient groundwater irrigation. Fortunately, incentives in agriculture for higher power quality are given, resulting from the high costs of pump set burnouts through voltage uctuations. This incentive can be combined with energy e ciency measures. E ective measures are most feasible at the level of the electricity sub-station, isolating an agricultural electricity feeder and the connected distribution transformers.