Climate change in global perspective has become a high priority issue. Energy plays a critical role in the climate change phenomenon with production of energy depending largely on natural resources. Energy planning is a new concept in most of the developing countries like India. Due to volatility in the energy planning discourse it is necessary to have a clear guideline for energy planning. It has to be brought to the mainstream from the sidelines with decentralised planning process. Keeping this in view Development Alternatives has developed a toolkit with the help of Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

The validation of the toolkit was done by taking up case studies to check the participatory process. The toolkit draws lessons from practical experience gathered by different NGOs on community-based renewable energy plants and thus provides guidelines for participatory village energy planning for setting up sustainable decentralised renewable energy plants (DRE). It has been prepared in consultation with various key stakeholders such as Panchayati Raj Institutions, government officials, farmers, local NGOs and community members. The formalisation of energy planning was done through interlinking energy plans into village micro-plans. The validation of the toolkit has been done through a sequence of phases: preparatory phase, stakeholder engagement stage, village energy plan preparation and finalisation phase. The process also tried an attempt to modify the toolkit while learning from the grass root level interventions.

Above is a graphic to explain process followed to conduct the validation of the toolkit.

Integration with Decentralised Planning Process: One of the major objectives of the participatory village energy plan was to integrate energy planning with decentralised formal planning process. The reason behind this was to make the plan sustainable and viable.

The steps followed for the integration are:

a) Preparation of GIS based map of the study area which will act as a database system for village level.

b) Continuous consultation with stakeholders at every stage to highlight needs and requirements of the people.

c) Capacity building and community mobilisation, and creation of Village Energy Committees for plan implementation and monitoring.

d) Budget mapping of the plan and identification of potential sources for fund mobilisation.

e) Approval of the plan in Gram Sabha meetings for future actions.

Conclusion: It can be concluded that participatory plan preparation may be time consuming and little cumbersome due to community conflict resolution and mobilization. But it is the most democratic and decentralised way of planning. The essence of bottom-up approach in planning pedagogy can be achieved through this sort of participatory planning interventions. q