What is the issue?
- Prime Minister recently announced that all inhabited villages in India now enjoy electrification.
- But a household level look highlights several disparities and thus needs deeper attention.
What is the claim?
- As of April 1, 2015, the official count of unelectrified villages was around 18,000.
- But recently, PM announced that all inhabited villages now enjoy electrification.
- It signalled a significant milestone in the country’s development.
- It is an achievement that will raise aspirations in the remotest districts.
What is the concern?
- The existing definition to declare a village electrified is coverage of a mere 10% of households.
- This is, along with the common facilities such as schools, panchayats and health centres.
- However, these broad-based statistics fail to bring out several disparities.
- These include:
- the actual number of households in villages that have power connections
- number of hours they get reliable power
- the per capita power that rural and urban Indians consume
What is the actual electrification scenario?
- Millions of homes still lack this vital resource in India.
- Rural household electrification has a wide range across States, from 47% to 100%.
- The average hours of power supplied in a day to rural areas also varies widely among states.
- It ranges from 11.5 in Mizoram, 17.72 in Uttar Pradesh and 24 hours in Kerala, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.
- Thus the claim of electrification loses validity with these small scale statistics.
- Even with supportive Central schemes, the Power for All 24x7 goal with a deadline of April 1, 2019 is far from realistic.
What are the challenges?
- These anomalies are often the result of infrastructure deficits and administrative inefficiency.
- There is a clear divergence between the per capita electricity consumption between rural and urban India.
- Thus, improving access and equity would be the twin challenges to be faced.
- The falling cost of renewable, decentralised sources such as solar photovoltaics represents a ready solution for rural India.
- However, evidence from States such as Maharashtra highlights the challenges in this.
- It made an early claim to full electrification 6 years ago relying partly on solar power.
- But it witnesses theft, damage and lack of technical capacity and the hurdles therein.
What could be done?
- A hybrid solution i.e. scaling up of both grid-connected and standalone solar systems in appropriate areas would be a way out.
- Augmenting conventional sources of electricity, with a clear emphasis on rooftop solutions for cities could be taken up.
- Cheaper renewables will enable differential pricing for households in remote areas.
- This would be a key determinant of wider social benefits of electricity.
- In all, rural electrification in India and affordable power to every household needs sustained policy support.
Source: The Hindu