Advancing energy access in India: Role of government and markets

Abstract

Energy is considered crucial for building a modern and prosperous society. The enormity can be gauged from the fact that nearly 1.2 billion people across the world don’t have access to the electricity and nearly 2 billion don’t get reliable and enough electricity to meet their wants. A large majority of energy poor live in India than anyplace.

India has made significant advances in recent decades to provide access to its vast underserved population when GOI stated that 590 721 out of 597,464 villages have been electrified with rate of electrification rate reaching to 99.9%. But still the conundrum is that some 300 million or 23% of the population are without access to electricity (NITI Aayog, 2017). This contrasting picture underscores both the difficulty in providing energy access as a concept, and the distinctiveness of the “Power for All” challenge in India. In ensuring access to electricity India faces number of obstacles in terms of generation, transmission and distribution on one side and on other side policy, regulation, economics and reform.

This policy paper aims to study the current energy access landscape, dominated by electricity being provided centralised grid which itself draws overwhelmingly from the generation of power from fossil-based fuels mainly coal which itself has significantly contributed to the India’s Carbon emissions. The policy paper argues for alternatives which will address some of the issues like barriers to Last Mile connectivity by proposing promoting of off based grid systems.

In the process we explore how private sector can play complementary role and, in the process, become part of planning in achieving electrification. Private sector through its valuable contribution of supplying energy access can target the poorest of poor in more effective manner. The business opportunity and certainty would enable the private sector to invest necessary resources in coming up with appropriate solutions that are novel to cater to the millions of potential users who are widely spread difficult to reach physical settings.