The Dynamic Effects of Electricity Supply on Indian Industry
Columbia University
Eligibility
Undergraduate Only
Accepts Applications Until
Dec 20, 2025
Project Duration
Flexible
Description
The project aims to uncover the dynamic effects of electricity shortages on Indian manufacturing. Since 2010, firms have moved away from self-generation of electricity while reliance on the electricity grid has increased dramatically. This is likely to have an impact on how issues of grid reliability, such as power blackouts, intermittency, etc affect production. The effect would be moderated by firms’ insurance mechanisms to outages, such as availability of self-generation, but such mechanisms require capital and are costly. This project, hence 1) aims to undercover how the industry’s sensitivity of electricity supply has changed over the years, and 2) models self-generation adoption to understand the steady state effects on firm size, growth and capital.
Major work would be towards building a dataset for the Indian electricity sector from 2006 – Present. The data exists publicly as pdf/xls files on the government websites. This needs to be downloaded, or to be more efficient, scraped. Then, the RA would work on cleaning, processing and aggregating the datasets as consistent panels.
Required Skills
Knowledge of Python or similar programming languages would be useful. Experience with web scraping, while useful, is not necessary as it can be learnt on the job, through resources such as ChatGPT.
Additional Information
Selected RAs will need to register for a Research Course. Students registered for research course GU4996 will receive either 1 or 2 college credits and be charged for those chosen credits (relevant only to students who pay by the credit). GS (General Studies) students have the option of participating in a research project at no cost by instead registering for GU4995 for 1 credit, for which they will not be billed. However, in the case of GU4995, the 1 credit may not be used to fulfill the minimum credit limit of a Columbia degree.
In both cases, students will receive a letter grade on their transcript for their work as an RA. However, in either case, research credit may not be used as a substitute for elective or seminar requirements in the major.