Nagaland: WRI India launches energy access explorer in state for unserved and underserved communities

After Jharkhand and Assam, the World Resources Institute (WRI) India launched its flagship geospatial platform, energy access explorer or EAE, for Nagaland in Kohima on July 28.

A WRI India official told this correspondent EAE is a geospatial platform that provides data on electricity, health, education and livelihood indicators in the regions that it serves to aid policymakers, entrepreneurs and governments to decide the least cost and most sustainable energy access solutions for unserved and underserved communities to accelerate development.

Adviser to Nagaland chief minister and chairman of the Investment and Development Authority of Nagaland (IDAN) Abu Metha launched the project.

In his address, Metha said, "EAE is going to play a vital role in the development and will bring a new narrative for the state of Nagaland. When we talk about progress and development, one of the backbones is energy. Without energy, no progress is possible.

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We look forward to strengthening our partnership with WRI India so that we can collectively share knowledge and move towards our collective aspirations."

The WRI official said about a third of Nagaland's 434 sub-health centres and 12% of 2074 government schools do not have access to electricity. As several of them are in remote regions, deploying innovative solutions to meet such demands of social infrastructure is the key to the state's equitable development, he said.

Speaking at the programme, Akansha Saklani, manager, the energy programme, at WRI India said the EAE platform can be layered with different data sets to help visualize the state of play of each sector.

“If we overlay the Global Horizontal Irradiation data onto the existing demand information, we could potentially estimate how best to solarize these underserved communities," she said.

Besides providing energy access-related solutions, the EAE can aid in decarbonizing the health and education sectors by deploying decentralized renewable energy systems, thus supporting India in its efforts to meet half its energy needs from renewables by 2030 and attain net zero emissions by 2070.

Aside from Jharkhand, Assam and Nagaland in India, the EAE has been implemented in six sub-Saharan countries in Africa - Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Zambia and Nigeria.