8.2.7. Rural Electrification

The big push to rural electrification came in 2005 with the launch of the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY) and then accelerated further in 2010-11, when there was a significant increase in budgetary outlay for this. However, the RGGVY programme failed to live up to its motives.

Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY): This scheme focuses on feeder separation (rural households & agricultural) and strengthening of sub-transmission & distribution infrastructure including metering at all levels in rural areas. This will help in providing round the clock power to rural households and adequate power to agricultural consumers. The RGGVY has been subsumed in the new scheme as its rural electrification component.

The scheme prioritizes feeder separation, metering at all levels (input points, feeders and distribution transformers), Micro grid and off grid distribution network, fortifying the sub- transmission and distribution network.

In this context, it needs to be noted that since 2005, a village has been deemed to be electrified if:

♤ Basic infrastructure such as distribution transformer and distribution lines are provided in the inhabited locality as well as the dalit basti/hamlet where it exists.

♤ Electricity is provided to public places such as schools, panchayat office, health centres, dispensaries, community centres, etc.

♤ The number of households electrified is at least 10 per cent of the total number of households in the village.

However, this requires only the provision of the electricity line to that point, not actual continuous access. It does not account for the regularity or consistency of the power received. So even if a few houses in a village receives only a couple hours of electricity a day for a few days in the year, the village is still deemed to be electrified. After electrification, therefore, there is the further process that is described as “intensification” by the government, in which individual households are electrified until all households are provided access.

This process is ongoing in all States and in all villages including those that have been deemed to be electrified for many years, such as in Punjab, Haryana and Maharashtra. So, the proportion of households with access to electricity differs significantly from the proportion of villages electrified.

In April, 2019, the Union Government announced achieving 100 percent rural electrification. But that does not mean universal access to electricity to all households. Only around 71 per cent of all households in the country have electricity (and even this need not be regular or reliable) — but this covers both urban and rural areas. Clearly, rural access would be lower than for urban households, and some have estimated that for India as a whole, only around 60 per cent of rural households have some access to electricity — which means that still two-fifths of rural households do not and universal access to reliable electricity is still a long way from being met in rural India.