What is the background?
- India has four crore un-electrified rural households.
- The year 2022, has been earmarked for achieving the target of “24x7 Power for All”.
- Achieving this target would mean electrifying more than 7 lakh households every month!
Is the government on track?
- Government has made steady progress in recent years.
- Data from the power ministry suggest that the Government has electrified more than three-fourths of the remaining 18,000-plus unelectrified villages since it came to power in 2014.
- Recently, the Government has also shifted focus from village electrification, which required only 10 per cent of the households in a village to be electrified, to electrifying every household.
What are some of the teething problems?
- However, providing an electricity connection to every household does not guarantee electricity access.
- Among the most energy deprived states, surveys have found that while most villages and more than two-thirds of the households had electricity connections, less than 40 per cent had meaningful access to electricity.
- Many rural consumers were displeased with the poor power supply and cited reliability, quality, duration, and affordability as key concerns.
- Success mainly depends on curbing discom losses and ensuring consumer honesty.
What could be the possible priorities areas in the future?
- The first step towards the target would be to provide new connections to un-electrified households and legalising existing illegal connections.
- Secondly, improving uptake of connections by addressing financial hurdles and awareness barriers is to be taken up.
- Financial Issues - High upfront cost is the major reason behind consumer disinterest in taking up an electricity connection.
- While BPL households already receive a free connection under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY), APL families could be given a low-cost EMI based connection.
- Awareness - Empowering and encouraging local authorities to organise awareness campaigns and enrolment camps in habitations exhibiting limited awareness are also essential.
- Bihar has currently evolved a good model both awareness campaigns & subsidy for APL families.
- Supply situation - Improving the supply situation for already electrified households is to be done.
- In Bihar, Jharkhand and UP, more than one-third of electrified households received less than four hours of supply during the day and voltage fluctuations are also common.
- DISCOMs need to better plan for their infrastructure, factoring in near-term increase in demand, strengthening maintenance, and improving supply.
- Innovative Business - As managing rural customers, particularly in remote areas, is a challenge innovative business models need to be explored.
- Maintenance and operations such as reading meters, generating bills, and collecting revenues, are key concerns.
- To better manage their services, discoms could explore a franchisee model by collaborating with local mini-grid operators.
- Distributed generation - Models like rooftop solar power could complement centralised grid electricity to ensure sustained use of electricity for the entire rural economy.
- Such models need to be promoted.
- It is hoped that electrification would lead to improved consumer satisfaction, as electricity truly becomes an enabler of prosperity in rural India.
Source: Businessline
