Identifying Strategies to Improve the Quality of Electricity Supply and Operations of Electricity Utilities in India

In 2019, India announced it had reached a 100 percent rate of household electrification. Now comes the hard part: providing newly connected households with reliable, high-quality power supply. Many rural areas of India have low-quality and unreliable supply that likely harms investment and economic growth. The Government of India, which subsidized household connections, is trying to institute a national monitoring framework to promote reliable power and to prevent the degradation of its own investments in energy access. This project is to develop a national-level partnership with the Rural Electrification Corporation (REC) with two goals. First, gather administrative data on power supply reliability (and other measures) on a representative national basis to measure 100 percent electrification has been achieved in fact and any gaps in energy access or supply. The research team will work with the REC to publish the results in an annual report on the quality of power supply across India. Second, identify opportunities in various states for collaborative evaluations to improve energy access, reliability, and efficiency.