Energy access for marginalized communities: Evidence from rural North India, 2015–2018

How equitable was India's energy access surge

Rural energy access in India improved steadily across the 2010s. National reforms expanded grid electricity and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) connections, and also aimed to improve the quality of access.

Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) households have historically had lower energy access than others. This disparity is specific to the Indian context. We ask how equitable the recent improvements have been. The question has two parts that are easy to conflate. One is whether historically marginalised households closed the gap in obtaining a connection. The other is whether the supply arriving through that connection is comparable in quality. Government statistics report the first. If reforms equalised connections but not supply, those statistics would record an equity success while the lived difference persisted.

Panel data with caste-year interaction terms

We use the Access to Clean Cooking Energy and Electricity Survey of States (ACCESS), a two-wave panel representative of rural areas in six of India's poorest states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. The first wave surveyed 8,563 households in 714 villages in 2015, and the second 9,071 households in 756 villages in 2018. Village-level sampling weights apply throughout.

We estimate a linear regression with caste and year interactions. The coefficient of interest is the interaction between an SC/ST indicator and the 2018 wave: how much more or less SC/ST households improved than all others. We run two parallel specifications, one with village fixed effects and one with household fixed effects. Fixed effects compare each village or household with itself over time, removing stable differences between them. Controls include monthly expenditure, poverty-card status and household size, plus education, age, gender and religion of the respondent in the village models. We model eight outcomes: LPG and grid connection, LPG home delivery, daily and evening supply hours, outage days, and days of low and fluctuating voltage. A parallel analysis compares Below Poverty Line (BPL) card holders, the reforms' stated target group, with all others.

Connection rates converged but supply quality stayed unequal

We find that the gap in SC/ST households' likelihood of obtaining an LPG connection narrowed by 4.6%-points [95% CI: 1.5 to 7.7]. The gap in grid connection did not change: the interaction is small and statistically insignificant, against an improvement of 17.5%-points [CI: 16.4 to 19.2] among all others.

Beyond binary connections, SC/ST supply improved less on almost every attribute. Daily supply hours improved less by 1.42 hours [1 to 1.83], and evening supply hours by 0.26 hours [0.14 to 0.38]. The reduction in monthly outage days was smaller by 1 day [0.7 to 1.3], and in low-voltage days by 0.63 days [0.05 to 1.2]. One outcome runs the other way: fluctuating-voltage days fell more for SC/ST households, by 0.27 days [0.01 to 0.52].

For BPL households, connection gaps narrowed for both LPG, by 11.8%-points [9.7 to 14.9], and grid, by 7%-points [4.2 to 9.7]. Yet daily supply hours again improved less, by 0.54 hours [0.08 to 1]. This fits the reforms' explicit pro-poor targeting, which makes no statement on marginalised communities or on supply adequacy. It suggests states focussed on new connections rather than supply quality for the newly connected.

Binary connection statistics obscure supply inequity

Disaggregate analysis suggests these broad trends are composed of distinct state-level patterns. Baselines, marginalised population distributions, institutional capacity and accountability all appear to shape them. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the two states with the most noticeable gains in connection rates, supply quality improved faster for the general than the SC population. In states with large ST populations, all households gained connections, but ST households did not catch up.

Household energy access policies that do not ensure adequate supply for all sections of the population risk perpetuating historical caste-based inequities in rural northern India. Without a multi-dimensional view of supply, infrastructure improvements will keep lagging behind the connection of remote and hard-to-reach SC/ST communities. These outcomes remain obscured in binary, connection-based government statistics. Energy policy reform must account for caste-based inequities and use multi-dimensional supply measurement, disaggregated across population groups, to encourage equitable progress towards sustainable energy access for all.