• Corpus ID: 37217110

A Study of Rural Electrification Infrastructure in India

@inproceedings{Samanta2015ASO,
  title={A Study of Rural Electrification Infrastructure in India},
  author={Dr. Pradeepta Kumar Samanta},
  year={2015}
}

• D. K. Samanta
• Published 2015
• Economics

Energy is one of the key drivers of development and access to clean, safe and affordable sources of energy are considered as instrumental to stimulate economic, social and physical development. Availability of energy/power facilitates effective and efficient delivery of most basic services such as safe drinking water, public lighting, health care, education, etc. Besides, it also enables better standards of household living and fuelling economic and income generation activities. It has usually been observed that a high correlation exists between consumption of electricity (energy) and improvements in the Human Development Index (HDI), especially at low levels of HDI. Lack of access to clean and efficient energy sources has thus been proved as one of the significant barriers to alleviation of poverty. India, despite the unprecedented pace of addition in the generation capacity over the Plan period, continues to have very low levels of energy consumption. The per capita energy consumption in India remains well below the world averages. This low level of energy availability and consumption tends to affect the poorest the most. While 16 % of the global population are residing in India, its share of global energy consumption is a paltry 4.2 %. Similarly, India’s per capita electricity consumption of around 734 kWh is way below the global average of 2,782 kWh and China’s 2,471 kWh. In India, rural per capita consumption of electricity is only 8kWh per month compared to 24 kWh in urban areas. Indian economy has traditionally been characterised as an agrarian economy with majority of its population living in the rural areas and are dependent on their farm land to earn their livelihood. These areas often do not have access to energy resources for livelihood expansion like power for irrigation, cold storage or processing and for normal day-to-day activities and are instead dependent on traditional and unclean sources of energy like woody biomass, dung cakes, kerosene, etc. As a result, the opportunities for productivity enhancements and value addition get limited by the lack of modern and efficient energy services. India has approximately 400 million people with no access to electricity, a majority of whom live in the rural areas. One of the key reasons for this is that such rural population resides in areas where geographical distribution combined with terrain and low purchasing power of consumers creates hurdles in providing uninterrupted electricity supply. As a result, limited investments have gone into maintaining and sustaining infrastructure for energy delivery, even if it gets built under government programmes. Rural areas usually suffer on account of the poor and under developed state of transmission and distribution infrastructure and sometimes even lack adequate distribution capacity to supply electricity. Since independence, almost every Five Year Plan made provision for rural electrification through various policy initiatives. The establishment of Rural Electrification Corporation in 1969 mandated to finance and promote rural electrification projects all over the country. Notwithstanding these initiatives, household electrification and access to sustainable quality electricity services remains a dream for more than half of the households in India. The present study analyses the emerging issues of electrification infrastructure in rural India.