Talk with Heather Bedi on 'Our Energy, Our Rights’: Power and Justice in Bangladesh and India
Date: 19th July 2016, 11 am
Venue: room 3.1.c (FFU conference room), Ihnestraße 22
Energy deficits remain an enduring challenge in Bangladesh, exemplified by the outage of November 2014 that left 160 million people without electricity. There is agreement that the world’s ninth most populous nation needs power, but the form and means of energy generate intense debate. Some promote coal, nuclear, and natural gas to power the nation. Activists and certain members of civil society strongly reject dirty energy with exploitative human rights, labor, and climate change costs. New spaces and forms of energy extraction and processing in Bangladesh alter national energy debates, and provide a nascent landscape for examining confluences and contradictions related to energy procurement and human rights. This contested space is exemplified by the proposal of the Rampal coal fired power plant, a joint energy project with India.