Who Benefits Most from Rural Electrification? Evidence in India

By Shahidur R. Khandker, Hussain Samad, Rubaba Ali, D. Barnes. 2012

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper applies an econometric analysis to estimate the average and distribution benefits of rural electrification using rich household survey data from India. The results support that rural electrification helps reduce time allocated to fuel wood collection by household members and increases time allocated to studying by boys and girls. Rural electrification also increases labor supply of men and women, schooling of boys and girls, household per capita income and expenditure. Electrification also helps reduce poverty. But the larger share of benefits accrues to wealthier rural households, with poorer ones having a more limited use of electricity. The analysis also shows that restricted supply of electricity, due to frequent power outages, negatively affects both household electricity connection and its consumption, thereby reducing the expected benefits of rural electrification.

Subfields: Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e18ac84b1f6a55a22152aa2a9552e53d91a219c9

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Citations in the corpus

Long-Term Impacts of Household Electrification in Rural India (2013, background): “Villages do not shift location in rural India, and even by 1999, power generating plants were often several hundred kilometers away from villages (see Table A1).”
Energy poverty in Ghana: Any progress so far? (2019, background): “In terms of education, empirical evidence shows that countries with higher levels of access to electricity tend to have higher literacy rates and lower drop-out rates, and devote significant time to reading and studying [29].”
Access to modern energy: a review of barriers, drivers and impacts (2016, background): “For adults in India, for example, this can be a consequence of the shorter time allocated to collecting biofuels (Khandker et al. 2012), but it also contributes to important changes in children’s lives, particularly with regard to the time dedicated to study and schooling.”
Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development? (2019, unknown): “Khandker et al. (2014) is one of the early studies to use an econometric approach to address this question.”
Barriers to Electrification for "Under Grid" Households in Rural Kenya (2014, unknown): “Several studies suggest that rural electrification drives improvements in employment, health, agricultural productivity, and education (see, e.g., Dinkelman 2011; Khandker et al. 2012; Kitchens and Fishback 2013; Lipscomb et al. 2013; Barron and Torero 2014).”
Women’s empowerment through electricity access: scoping study and proposal for a framework of analysis (2017, background): “In another study from India (UNDP/ESMAP 2004, 60), Barnes and Sen found that women with electricity at home spent more time earning an income than households without, but this single difference estimate used within various economical strata (that is, not systematically controlled for) only applied t”
Experimental Evidence on the Economics of Rural Electrification (2020, unknown): “29 For example, some studies find that access to electricity increases measures of rural living standards such as income and consumption (Khandker, Barnes, and Samad 2012; Khandker et al. 2014; van de Walle et al. 2015; Chakravorty, Emerick, and Ravago 2016), while others find no evidence of impacts”