Powering the last house

Electricity access for all villages is an achievement. Connecting households and providing customer service are bigger challenges

At end-April 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the electrification of all 0.64 million villages in India had been completed. It was a truly landmark achievement, not just for the government of the day, but in the history of independent India. In 1951, only 3,000-odd villages had electricity. A dream that began over 70 years ago finally got realised.

Till the early 1960s, village electrification remained below 5 per cent, but it picked up dramatically after the green revolution. By 1990, on the eve of reforms, around 80 per cent of villages had been electrified. A renewed push for rural electrification in the post-reform years occurred in 2005 with the RGGVY (Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana) programme.

But, we have now only completed the first stage of a three-stage journey. Without belittling the effort of all the funding and political and bureaucratic energy invested by not just this government but all previous ones, this first step, frankly, has been relatively the easiest. The gradient gets progressively steeper henceforth. 

What has been achieved, to put it very simply, is to pull a wire up to the entrance of the village, and put the enabling infrastructure, such as transformers and electricity pylons, in place. If 10 per cent of households in a village have a power connection, and public places such as schools and panchayat offices have power, that village is defined as electrified. 

The bigger challenge now relates to the next two stages — connecting every household in the village to the grid, and finally, putting in place a system of regular customer service, billing and maintenance, which will ensure that rural families actually get electricity on a regular basis, are fairly charged for it, and have access to an effective and prompt mechanism to fix problems of supply.

The magnitude of stage two — connecting households (rather than just the village) to the grid, can be understood from a simple statistic. According to saubhagya.gov.in, a government site which tracks household electrification, around 31.5 million households (14 per cent of total households) are still to be electrified. Fourteen per cent may, prima-facie, seem a small gap to be filled; but we should not underestimate the size of the task. Across infrastructure sectors, the so-called ‘last-mile problem’ is often the most difficult and intractable to solve. 

Let there be light: Once connected to the grid and ensured of a regular supply of electricity, households will see the value in paying the economic costs of electricity

It is one thing to build that national highway — quite another to build multiple village roads connecting the highway to nearby villages, thus enabling the farmer to move his perishable produce from farm to mandi in the shortest possible time. It is one thing to build that advanced, technologically sophisticated, and modern urban metro system — quite another to ensure a regular and effective system of feeder buses that will connect the metro station to houses in surrounding colonies, thus ensuring that women can travel home late at night without worrying about their personal safety on the road from the station to their front door. Indeed, the electrification of rural households has consistently lagged the electrification of villages by 35- 40 percentage points since the early 1980s. As of Census 2011, 55 per cent of rural households had been electrified.

Such last mile problems cannot be solved simply by more money, or creating a centralised organisation that can build that infrastructure (the way that National Highways Authority of India can build a national network of highways, for instance). Village roads, or urban bus transit are the task of local governments. Connecting every village household to the electricity grid will involve extensive cooperation among centrally sponsored schemes, state utilities, the relevant local electricity distribution companies, their contractors and village level administrators. Each state, each district and each village will face a different set of implementation issues.

And even after the last-mile connect, the next challenge (stage three) is to keep the network regularly and professionally serviced. It makes little sense to talk of village electrification if households are connected to the grid, but face power blackouts for days on end because a faulty transformer has not been repaired, or electricity poles, damaged in a thunderstorm, are left unfixed. 

It also makes little sense to talk of village electrification if power distribution companies resort to load shedding in the face of mounting losses on each unit of electricity generated and because an effective and corruption-free system of metering and billing has not been set up. And if, to offset high costs of power, tariffs are increased, with little focus on actually improving power supply and service to consumers, then it would have been an exercise in futility. 

However, overcoming such challenges brings along huge benefits. Once connected to the grid, ensured of a regular supply of electricity, and prompt redressal of consumer complaints, households will see the value in paying the economic costs of electricity. Households will see even greater value, if they are given quick and convenient methods of paying for electricity (such as electricity cards which can be used to charge prepaid electricity meters) and get the service and respect they are entitled to as paying customers.

Only when that happens, will we truly achieve the target of electricity for all.

The author is chairman, Feedback Infra 

“vinayak.chatterjee@feedbackinfra.com”; Twitter: @Infra_VinayakCh