What India’s power sector can learn from a food label conversation
By Mayuri Singh and Nishant Saxena
A recent post by a food-sector educator and entrepreneur, Revant Himatsingka (Food Pharmer), drew attention to a persistent but rarely examined issue in India’s consumer economy. Most packaged food products carry ingredient lists and nutrition labels almost exclusively in English, even though a large majority of Indian consumers are far more comfortable reading Indian languages. The concern was simple – people cannot make informed choices about what they consume if they cannot easily read what is written on the packet.
The proposed solution was to add QR codes on packaging, allowing consumers to scan and read labels in regional languages. While well intentioned, this approach exposed a deeper limitation. QR codes assume smartphone access, digital confidence, and the willingness or ability to scan before purchase.
For many shoppers, especially in everyday retail settings, that assumption does not hold. More importantly, placing comprehension behind a digital step keeps English as the default and accessibility as an optional layer. Inclusion becomes conditional rather than built in. The core problem remains unresolved – systems are designed for convenience of producers, not clarity for users.
This pattern extends well beyond food.
India’s power sector, for all its technical progress, reflects a similar logic. Electrification has reached the last mile. Digital systems now govern billing, metering, grievance redressal, and consumer interfaces. Yet many of these systems continue to assume an English-first user, both in form and in tone. The result is a quiet contradiction. Formal access exists, but functional comprehension remains uneven.
This gap is not accidental. It is embedded in how institutions design communication, interpret inclusion, and prioritise efficiency over understanding.
The comfort of compliance over comprehension
In both food and electricity, regulatory frameworks often treat disclosure as the endpoint of responsibility. Information is provided. Rules are followed. The obligation appears complete. Yet disclosure without comprehension merely satisfies form, not substance.
In the power sector, tariffs, bills, connection terms, net-metering rules, outage notices, and grievance procedures are routinely issued in language that presumes familiarity with English and regulatory vocabulary. For a large section of consumers, especially first-time formal users of electricity systems, these documents remain difficult to interpret.
The system remains compliant while the consumer remains uncertain.
This pattern mirrors the food packaging issue. An ingredient list printed in English technically informs, yet practically excludes. The same logic applies when a smart meter advisory, a rooftop solar condition, or a disconnection notice is written in a language the consumer does not comfortably read. Inclusion becomes symbolic rather than real.
Market logic disguised as neutrality
English is often defended as a neutral choice. It avoids linguistic politics. It standardises processes. It reduces administrative cost. In national markets, it is seen as efficient.
Yet neutrality is rarely neutral in its effects. English functions as a gatekeeper precisely because it aligns with purchasing power, urbanisation, and institutional familiarity. Systems designed around it quietly privilege those already comfortable navigating formal structures.
In electricity markets, this manifests clearly. Consumers who understand bills, challenge errors, compare tariffs, or evaluate rooftop payback tend to be those already fluent in the system’s language. Others remain passive recipients of outcomes they do not fully grasp.
Markets then read this passivity as lack of interest or low awareness. In reality, it is often lack of accessible explanation.
The cost of misunderstanding in a decentralised system
As India’s power sector becomes more decentralised, this communication gap carries greater consequence. Rooftop solar, time-of-day tariffs, smart meters, demand response, and electric vehicle charging all require active consumer participation. They assume interpretation, trust, and behavioural response.
A system built for centralised generation could tolerate limited consumer understanding. A system built on distributed assets cannot.
When households hesitate to adopt rooftop solar despite incentives, when farmers mistrust solar pumps despite long-term savings, or when consumers suspect billing systems despite technical accuracy, the barrier is rarely technology alone. It is confidence.
Confidence grows from clarity. Clarity grows from communication designed for real users, not ideal ones.
Lessons hiding in plain sight
The food packaging discussion reveals a truth that power sector reforms often overlook. Inclusion cannot be retrofitted through add-ons. QR codes, helplines, and footnotes help, but they do not substitute for first-layer accessibility.
In electricity systems, this means consumer-facing communication must be designed in local languages from the outset, not appended later. It means bills that explain, not merely state. It means grievance systems that guide, not intimidate. It means regulatory intent translated into everyday understanding.
Most importantly, it requires recognising communication as infrastructure. Just as transformers and feeders are planned deliberately, so must information pathways be.
Trust as system design
Recent public statements by policymakers have acknowledged the risk of misinformation and the need to secure consumer support for new technologies. This recognition is timely. Misinformation thrives where official communication leaves gaps. Trust erodes when systems speak in a language that feels distant or exclusionary.
Trust is not built through slogans or campaigns. It is built through consistency, transparency, and respect for the user’s context. When people understand how decisions are made, how data is used, and where accountability lies, resistance softens.
This is not a communications problem in the narrow sense. It is a governance problem expressed through language.
Inclusion that works beyond paper
India’s power sector has achieved extraordinary scale. The next phase will be judged less by megawatts and more by participation. An English-first system may remain efficient on paper, yet it risks reproducing the very exclusions that reform seeks to dismantle.
True inclusion begins –
→ When systems are designed around comprehension, not just compliance.
→ When understanding becomes the baseline, not a bonus.
→ When communication is treated as a public good rather than an administrative afterthought.
This is where strategic communication stops being about messaging and starts becoming about system design. Translating policy, regulation, and technology into language that builds confidence is now a core capability for the sector, not an optional one.
At Comm’fident, this intersection of energy, regulation, and narrative is where much of our work now sits. Not to simplify the sector, but to make it intelligible to the people who ultimately sustain it.
If India’s next phase of power-sector reform is to move faster and with fewer frictions, the stories we tell, and how we tell them, will matter as much as the infrastructure we build.
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