Thanks to an unusually cool and long "winter" this year in Chennai, my thoughts have turned to air-conditioning only in March.
Growing up in Pune and Mumbai, I neither had air conditioning nor knew anyon e who did, and this was not unusual but for the time and the region. But after living in Delhi and Chennai, two things became glaringly apparent - economic class and geographic location are key determinants of air conditioner/ cooler ownership. This is also borne out by work for us by my colleague Abhishek Waghmare on the ownership of physical assets by Indian households.
(A quick word about the data: the question in India's National Sample Surveys asks the respondent about whether they own an AC or an air-cooler, so for the most part, we're unable to separate the two out. But we know that the majority of people who own an AC or an air-cooler are actually air-cooler owners: in 2020, an NSS survey asked the question separately and found that just 5% of households owned an AC while 14% owned an air-cooler. So this newsletter will use the term AC/ air-cooler, but you now know that the majority of them are air-coolers.)
30% of Indian households now own an AC/ air-cooler, Abhishek finds, up from just 2% in the early 1990s. AC/ air-cooler ownership has actually grown faster than washing machine ownership, he finds.
But these are heavily concentrated among India's richest households (especially ACs), and among its arid central states (especially coolers), in a way that other assets are not concentrated.
One big shift is that more people can now afford ACs and air-coolers. At the same time, my colleague Juhi Chatterjee's recent work for us on rising temperatures makes it clear that the other big shift is a heating country.
In his searing book 'Moth Smoke', the writer Mohsin Hamid describes Lahore as being divided into two classes - the air-conditioned and the non-air-conditioned - and retreating to my air-conditioned car or home at the height of a Delhi summer, I'd feel this starkly. Rising heat, rising purchasing power and rising energy consumption are shifts that will all play out simultaneously in India, and some of these divides will be on test this summer.
