6.4. Promotion of community participation

The local government institutions also need strengthening to promote community participation in the planning and development process. These grassroots institutions, besides carrying out local projects with the involvement of communities within their jurisdiction, can also provide a powerful lobby through which communities can negotiate for services from sectoral agencies or departments of the government.

Unfortunately, the role of local councils in development efforts has been mostly underrated by planners, and is quite often overlooked in the implementation of energy projects, resulting in their failure to achieve the desired objectives. Energy plantation projects provide a case in point. It has been observed that, even when the political will is there and the funds are allocated, implementing a large-scale afforestation (plantation) campaign is an unexpectedly complex and difficult process. Planting millions of trees and successfully nurturing them to maturity is not purely a technical task, like building a dam. Further, tree-planting projects almost invariably get enmeshed in the political, cultural, and administrative tangles of a rural locality. The nature of their success, therefore, is largely governed by the intensity of community involvement through local government or other means. Central or state government stimuli in technical advice and financial assistance in such cases are ineffective (like some afforestation programmes in places like Yana in Kumta taluk) unless community members clearly understand why lands to which they had traditionally free access for grazing and wood gathering are being demarcated into plantations. Therefore, it is expected that they will view the project with suspicion or even hostility.

Also, the conservation efforts cannot succeed without strong commitment from the community. A major source of energy in the rural hill districts, such as Uttara Kannada, is biomass.Slight improvements in the efficiency of energy use from this source can substantially improve the physical quality of life of the rural people in such districts without any increase, or even decrease, in the supply of primary energy. Adoption of appropriate cooking devices (improved cooking stoves) alone can bring a major change in this direction. Likewise, the replacement of dung fuel with biogas can provide both energy and manure on one hand and improve the quality of the environment on the other.

There is a need to distinguish the difference between subsistence energy requirements and energy required for economic development. As far as the subsistence energy requirement is concerned, the existing energy consumption pattern, with the major chunk being met through bioresources for thermal energy requirements, indicates the importance of intervention in this sector. The low conversion efficiency of energy devices (using bioresources) is a significant aspect in the context of designing energy intervention plans. Bioresource surplus taluks, such as, Sirsi and Siddapur are associated with high levels of consumption. In areas with surplus resources, the implementation of the efficiency measures have to follow an effort to convince and educate local people about the importance of efficient usage of resources. In the biomass scarce region, the significance of the interventions for fuel switching (such as solar energy for water heating, drying, etc.), improvement in end use efficiencies and augmenting supplies (through social forestry and energy plantations on barren land) are to be adopted [50,51].