A landmark feat
A quarter of Indian households are still without power
On Sunday, the government announced that the goal of electrifying all Indian villages had been completed. This target, originally to be met by May 2017, has nevertheless been achieved with dispatch, and it is a milestone that deserves to be marked. On many levels, it is unfortunate that it has taken so long for Indian villages — defined in this case by the criteria used by the decennial census — to be electrified. The government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi rightly made this a priority, launched a system by which electrification could be tracked online, and did not miss its timescale by very much. The task was challenging, given that the last leg of electrification involved villages in remote locations and inhospitable terrain where moving men and material was difficult. The government thus deserves a measure of congratulations for the achievement.
Yet, the feat of electrification by itself does not practically mean as much as it should. A village is defined as electrified not if all its households or even all its subsidiary hamlets have been connected to the grid. The definition of electrification in this case is much weaker. It requires there to be provision of basic electrical infrastructure in the vicinity of the village; for public places, such as the panchayat office, to have provision for electricity; and that at least 10 per cent of the households in the village have access to electricity. There is nothing in this about universal access, or about the availability of power, or the reliability of electricity supply. A village can be electrified even if there is an electric line in the vicinity, a micro-grid supporting the panchayat office, and a couple of hours of power a day to a 10th of the households in the village.
Clearly, the really difficult last-mile problem of connecting households to the grid has yet to be solved. In fact, depending on various estimates, between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of households in India are still without power. The variability regionally in this statistic is also worth noting. In some states, such as Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, West Bengal, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, the percentage of households as yet unconnected to the grid is negligible. In other states, such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Assam, the number of households that are off the grid is about half. In UP and Bihar alone, 21 million households are still unconnected, almost half of the 41 million households still not electrified as of a few months ago. The village electrification achievement, of course, will also need to be verified over time — there have been some embarrassing occasions when official claims about a particular village having accessed electricity have been found to be exaggerated, incorrect, or questionable.
The “last-mile” problem therefore has not completely been solved. Bringing electricity to a village does not mean that the last mile to the household has been covered. Taking this additional step will require continued attention and more of the political will that has been so creditably devoted to the notion of rural electrification. Hopefully, the power ministry will now produce a dashboard of households not as yet electrified so that progress on the real target can be similarly monitored in real time.