Understanding Patterns and Impacts of Electricity Quality and Access in Northern India

Abstract

Indians have suffered from rolling outages and blackouts even as millions of citizens have gained access to electricity in recent years, which has led to concerns about electricity quality and its impacts. We conducted an in-person survey of 500 rural households in 40 communities in northern India. We used the World Bank Multi-Tier Framework and Principal Components Analysis to generate indexes of electricity quality, and ran multiple linear regressions to examine the correlations of these measures with socioeconomic indicators. We find that electricity quality varies strongly across zones served by different distribution companies, but is less closely related to the national electrification program Saubhagya. Electricity quality is also positively correlated with legal and older connections that tend to have more safety features, but unexpectedly, not positively correlated with household wealth. We find that access to electricity is strongly correlated with better standard of living, as measured by household consumption, and that better electricity quality is strongly correlated with decreased household fuel consumption.