In pursuit of a light bulb and a smokeless kitchen: longitudinal analysis of the role of energy sector policies to alleviate rural energy poverty in India

After more than six decades of development planning, the majority of India’s population,especially those living in villages, continue to wait for access to energy forms that enable them to switch on an electric light bulb and to cook food on a clean stove in a smokeless kitchen. India is a country of extreme economic and social contrasts, a situation that poses sustainability and development problems of varying magnitudes linked to its scale and geographical diversity. The rapidly growing economy, while bringing prosperity at the aggregate level, has also created social imbalances and inequities including in access to, and use of, resources. One of the outcomes of, and indeed a contributor to, economic growth has been an unprecedented increase in demand for energy. Embedded in meeting future energy demands is the challenge of providing access to modern energy carriers in rural India, an unfinished aspect of India’s development vision since 1947. Nearly 77 million rural households (approximately half of the rural households in India) have no access to electricity and about 120 million households (about 80% of the rural total) use biomass energy for cooking. It is recognised that the level of energy access in rural India is similar to, and in some cases even lower than, that of some of the poorest countries of the world. India faces the challenge of lifting low-capacity end-users out of energy poverty while pursuing its energy policy reforms. Therefore, the central focus of this dissertation is the impact on energy access by lowcapacity end-users of the shifts in the policy framework of India’s energy sector.