When we launched IE 41 years ago, we pledged to focus on balanced economic development of the different regions. At that time such development was concentrated in the West and the East. (Yes, it was the pre-Jyoti Basu era when West Bengal was still a leader in industrial development, especially in heavy engineering. Premier chambers of commerce had not yet migrated from Calcutta.)

Post-1991, in the liberalized era, states have been experiencing tremendous leeway for taking initiatives for speeding up development. With basic infrastructure improving, several states could devise special schemes and incentives to attract investments. With opportunities opening up for global reach and access for investments and technology, there emerged healthy competition among states to accelerate development. Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu… registered spectacular growth. The southern states and Maharashtra also leveraged their strengths in education and health infrastructure to seize emerging great opportunities in the services sector, notably, IT, post-1995.

IE has been holding that our magazine has a much larger and wider purpose than merely disseminating news and information. Right from the start IE has been espousing several causes relating to balanced economic growth. In this, it has not been swayed by narrow regional considerations. Through special issues and research and analyses, the magazine has exposed the cause of states like Orissa and Punjab for leveraging their very special endowments to speed up development.
Natural resources are not evenly distributed among different regions and states. Coal reserves, for instance, are concentrated on the eastern, northern and central parts of India and crude oil in the western, northwestern and far eastern parts of the country. While it is understandable that the major benefits for usage and royalty should go to the states endowed with such resources, there is also the legitimate expectation that such precious, limited resources should benefit the country as a whole.

There has been constant pressure for innovations in finding new sources of energy as also in improving the efficiency of existing resources. Look just at the evolution in exploiting crude oil over a century: from the initial primary use for transportation, heating and generation of power, the myriad uses of hydrogen and carbon unfolded; this resulted in the rapid evolution of the petrochemical industry putting to great use the different distillates of crude.

With crude prices shooting up, there was focus on utilising associated gas and also natural gas from wells that gave only gas. The facility and elegance of natural gas won appreciation and thousands of miles of pipelines were constructed to transfer gas from the wells to consumption centres. Energy-hungry countries like Japan also focused on liquefying the natural gas and transporting these through large-sized ships.

The world witnessed the next stage in this evolution: while it was easy to pluck the low hanging fruits, it did require efforts to reach the others. Affected by the vagaries of supplies and manipulation of their prices by the oil producing and exporting countries, developed countries, hungry for energy, intensified research: coal bed methane gas and gas from shale gained importance. In a separate article, oil expert Bhamy Shenoy deals with the emergence, in very quick time, of shale oil and gas as important energy sources in the US and how this has turned out to be the greatest innovation of this decade! From the precarious dependence on large scale imports, in a matter of just a few years, the US has emerged surplus in requirements of natural gas!

India has been spending increasingly large amounts of foreign exchange in importing crude oil and petroleum products. The import bill on this amounted to $90.39 bn in 2008-09 forming around 30 per cent of total merchandise imports. 2008-09, which depressed global sentiment through the financial meltdown, has some great news for cheer for India: for the first time in several years, crude production registered 11 per cent increase. For the current year, production of natural gas is set to register a 52.8 per cent growth. With the commencement of production of natural gas from the Krishna Godavari Basin in large quantities, there are promising prospects: KG Basin alone is estimated to produce from March 2010 around 82 ml cubic metres of gas per day (mmscmd). Over the next two years, there are estimates of gas production in the country increasing to a level of 250 to 300 mmscmd.

As yet the country has not looked at oil shale for which there are estimates of large scale reserves.

In this background we noticed a skewed allotment/usage of energy resources. This assumes enormous importance in the context of availability and the cost of energy. There is need for more equitable allocation of energy resources. IE focused on this in a seminar. This issue reports on this in detail.