Powerless: India’s Energy Shortage and Its Impact - Hardcover

This is a book about India's energy shortage, its causes, and consequences. Powerless details how much coal, oil, gas, uranium, and power the country uses, and for what purposes. It examines the quantity of these things the country produces and where. The book looks at the sizes of the gaps between supply and demand, and how the country fills them with imports. It then discusses how the shortages and resulting imports affect the country's economy, businesses, and residents. After examining the current scenario, the author moves on to look at predictions for how fast demand and supply will grow, how big the shortages of natural resources might become in the next few years, and whether India is likely to be able—politically, logistically, and financially—to fill these gaps with imports. The book also looks at the environmental and health effects of India's growing energy use, and how efforts to mitigate these are likely to affect demand for coal, oil, gas, and uranium.

Sam Tranum has worked in journalism for about a decade, writing for publications in the United States (the Charleston Daily Mail 2000–02, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel 2002–04, and Nuclear Intelligence Weekly 2009–11), editing for a paper in India (The Statesman 2011–12), and teaching journalism in Kyrgyzstan (2007–09) and India (2011). He holds an MA in international relations (2007) from the University of Chicago and a BA in social and global studies from Antioch College (2000) in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the United States. Tranum served in the US Peace Corps in Turkmenistan (2004–06), and wrote a memoir about his experience, Daily Life in Turkmenbashy’s Golden Age (2010). He taught journalism at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and published the anthology Life at the Edge of the Empire: Oral Histories of Soviet Kyrgyzstan (2009). He wrote about the energy business from Washington DC and Kolkata, and published a novella set in the uranium industry, U Is for Murder (2011).