Santosh Harish: Villages need power, not just electric lines

As per the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY), rural India is to be electrified completely by 2012. All BPL households are to be provided free electricity connections, and at least 10% of the households in each village are to be electrified along with the community facilities.

The programme started in 2005 and as per the official records, about 3,00,000 villages and 16.5 million BPL households have been covered so far. It would seem though that the programme, while being reasonably successful at providing the means to access electricity, has found providing the electricity itself rather difficult.

A recent Greenpeace social survey in villages in Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, suggests that the performance of the programme has been rather sketchy. Awareness about the programme and the entitlements under it is low.

The implementation in most villages, especially in the poorly electrified states of Bihar and UP, has often not covered the entire villages (the remainder presumably to be taken up later, but being deemed as an ‘electrified village’ nevertheless) and has inadvertently encouraged people to hook up to the power lines illegally.

As the transformers seem to be undersized for the village’s requirements, this has meant several transformers getting burnt out. Poor servicing has resulted in there being no power since.

While schools and community facilities are to be covered, this has not necessarily been the case. The supply itself is limited, of low quality and available when people have no need for it in the villages Greenpeace surveyed in UP and Bihar.

A more fundamental question would be what RGGVY means for the provision of reliable energy for lighting and productive activities in the villages. Given the centralized nature of the planning, and the limited supply, as an input to local industries, grid power is unlikely to be sufficient.

There are also bound to be constraints on resources like contractors, skilled labour and equipment such that the pace of implementation cannot keep up with the ambitious targets. Furthermore, a programme like this must necessarily be integrated with complementary development activities. While the document acknowledges this on paper, the implementation seems to suggest otherwise. Electrification, especially of poor quality, cannot be a solution in and of itself.

Decentralized Distributed Generation (DDG) of power at the level of villages or groups of villages makes eminent sense in this regard. The incentives of the service providers are aligned such that they would encourage an increase in load through local industries to ensure their own viability.

Similarly, they rely on involving the local communities extensively in order to get the credibility and trust. Hence, some of the essential ingredients in the decision making process are likely to be automatically supported by such an arrangement. Decentralized plants alone are not the panacea to the problem, however.

Going forward, it is probable that the RGGVY or an equivalent rural electrification policy would continue into the next five-year plan period. The time is still ripe for evolving an effective rural electrification framework. We need to organize several more social audits to take stock of the progress so far and understand what the limitations of the programme have been and how they should be corrected.

It must be clear that grid extension and distributed generation both have their place and must be seen as complementary to each other, as opposed to competing alternatives. The need of the hour is to mandate the quality of supply and actively consult the end-users and service providers in the design and implementation of the programme.

Decentralizing the decision making is easier said than done but it is absolutely essential if electrification has to have a tangible impact on thousands of lives. We have had several experiences, good and bad, and based on both grid and DDG, to leverage.

Let’s make them count.

The writer is a PhD student, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University