You will soon know how much the electrical appliance you are planning to buy will add to your monthly electricity bill.
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Each appliance will have an energy-efficiency-cum-rating label pasted prominently on it. The lowest rating will be one star, that is, the product is a heavy energy consumer. And the highest rating will be five stars — for products that consume the least energy. If you buy a five-starred appliance instead of a one-starred, the monthly energy saving will be 27 per cent.
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The label will also give you the average energy consumption of the appliance in one day.
"To start with, tubelights will have energy-efficiency ratings from mid-November," said Ajay Mathur, director-general, Bureau of Energy Efficiency, Ministry of Power. Next in line will be refrigerators, air conditioners and television sets.
The bureau follows a three-level process. At the first level, tests are conducted at the company's own testing facility. The second tests are carried out at a competitor's laboratory. The final tests are conducted at a government-approved national testing laboratory.
The move to introduce the rating system has started showing results. Mathur said one refrigerator company had replaced the insulation, reduced the number of wires and made changes in the compressor of its product to make it more energy efficient.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
