The book takes a socio-economic approach to analyzing the energy system and energy consumption in India from a household perspective. In doing so, it views households as the ultimate end-consumers and estimates and analyzes the direct and indirect energy requirements of household consumption, both at an aggregate national level as well as for individuals or groups of households. In addition, the work incorporates two crucial aspects often ignored by many traditional modelling approaches that are characteristic of most developing countries, namely the importance of non-commercial sources of energy, mostly biofuels, in the energy systems of these countries, and the very large diversity in the patterns of energy use across households with widely diverging lifestyles and levels of well being...

With energy consumption set to become one of the biggest issues in the daily lives of householders around the world, this book could not be more relevant - despite the fact that it focuses on India. Pachauri adopts a socio-economic approach to analyzing the energy system and energy consumption in India from a household perspective. The work also incorporates two crucial aspects often ignored: namely, the importance of non-commercial sources of energy, and diversity in the patterns of energy usage.