The Berkeley Lab's road-mapping tool can help forecast energy and water consumption accurately. "Indian municipalities are uncertain about their future patterns of consumption," says Maithili Iyer, programme manager at Berkeley Lab. "The road-mapping tool tells them about current consumption and forecasts the future." Both Pune and Jaipur are at the early stages of evaluating low-carbon planning tools; it is difficult to predict how they would use them in the future. But it is an approach that is certain to be adopted in many Indian cities soon. Since the tools help formulate policies, they would also help drive multi-billion dollar market opportunities. Jaipur, for example, is now struggling to manage its growth using conventional approaches.

Water supply is at breaking point and growth of city transport has been chaotic. City administrators had earlier tried to use solid waste to generate energy, but the nature of the city traffic made sure that the waste could not be transported efficiently to feed the plant. "A road-mapping tool will combine historic data from the city with trend analysis from other cities," says Jyotirmay Mathur, associate professor and coordinator, Centre for Energy and Environment at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology at Jaipur. "The city officials will then have data to go to the funding agencies."    See complete article in The Economic Times