The State Government wanted to study and analyse the problem of rural energy needs and to attempt solutions in a few villages. Normally, new developments take a long time to percolate to different rural areas; even this slow growth is diffused in many places. Hence it is difficult to study the impact of new developments, to study the societal behaviour with respect to these technologies and to hasten development of improved technologies by identifying diffusion mechanisms. In order to find solutions to these problems the integrated Rural Energy Programme was taken up in 1981. It was also felt desirable to have separate rural energy plans so as to reduce disparities in rural and urban energy uses and in use of different energy sources - both commercial and non-commercial. Activities pertaining to this programme are sequenced in Table 15.

1. Case studies. A pilot survey was conducted in four villages - two from Bangalore North Taluk and two from Udupi taluk (Dakshina Kannada District). Firewood was found to be dominant source of energy - 67 to 83% of per capita consumption is firewood; per capita consumption varied from 303 kg to 490 kg. The cost/person for energy varied from Rs. 60/- to Rs.835/-. The higher cost is due to large industrial consumption. Another interesting observation was low efficiency of end use devices, thereby reducing the usable per capita consumption considerably (Table 15). Another survey was conducted in five clusters (29 villages) in July-August 1982. This survey reveals that expenditure on energy as a proportion of income varies from 7% to 22%. Total annual domestic consumptions are 4100 tons of firewood, 1.72 lakh unit of electricity and 1.3 lakh litres of kerosene.

2. Identification of villages where the programme should be initiated.

3. Survey of villages on social factors and conditions energy consumption, availability of local resources.

4. Planning of rural energy projects which employ local, renewable resources, acceptable technologies and benefit a larger percentage of population. Projects can be individual beneficiary oriented, demonstration type, community type etc.

5. Monitoring of these projects.

The physical achievements under this scheme upto 31-3-84 are;

i) Solar cookers; for demonstration 30 - distributed with subsidy 5;

ii) Solar water heaters - distributed with subsidy 10;

iii) Choolas; for demonstration 509 - distributed with subsidy 25;

iv) Improved kerosene stoves;- distributed with subsidy 1987;