Coherence of rural electrification policies DDUGJY & NEP

Abstract

There is an imminent need to identify and address the vast electricity problems prevailing in rural India. The situation is better in the urban areas with only 4% [1] of the households not having access to electricity. In rural areas, 26% [1] of the households are in this state who depend upon kerosene or other fossil-fuels based lighting solutions. Nearly 304 million [1] people are deprived of this basic need in today’s world. This sends a bad message about the country’s energy policies and is also a hindrance to other policies aimed at improving the rural economy. To address these issues, NDA Government has launched the DDUGJY (Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana) scheme with the aim of electrifying all rural villages in India by 2019. They have identified 597,464 census villages to be electrified and till date, their website claims a 100% completion of the objective. Although this is a great achievement for a government initiative, the relevance of such electrification is arguable for a villager who needs electricity for agriculture and home lighting purposes. Also, with the raising awareness of global warming and India’s major electricity source still being non-renewable sources of energy, expanding the infrastructure to rural areas that provide nonrenewable based energy would be worsening the climate further. To support government objectives, NITI Aayog has drafted a National Energy Policy (NEP). As a part of this policy, certain suggestions to the existing “Rural Electrification” policies have been put forward in it. The coherence between the objectives of NEP and DDUGJY plays an important role in achieving the goal of electrification in a sustainable manner. This prompts for a deeper analysis of the Policy to understand the deficiencies and sustainability aspects of the Rural Electrification initiative and DDUGJY scheme.