Rural enterprises overlooked in Saubhagya's success story: Study

The study bares Saubhagya's overarching focus on household electrification, perhaps unintentionally prioritizing 'ghar' over 'dukan'

The Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana or Saubhagya scheme has a flip side to it despite achieving near 100 per cent electrification of households. A sizeable chunk of commercial rural enterprises are still cut off from grid-connected power as the scheme’s thrust is eminently on rural households, a study says.

The study commissioned jointly by Smart Power India, a subsidiary of the Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (USA) shows that only 65 per cent of the micro rural enterprises in the surveyed states of