Effectiveness of On-grid and Off-grid rural electrification approaches in India

Abstract

India is a country of villages, where agriculture is the biggest occupation, so developing these villages plays a major role in the country's progress. Rural electrification in India is considered as a serious issue for rural development, and is seen as the primary thing for all commercial activities and increasing agricultural productivity. Several programmes and policies have been promoted to electrify every village and every household mainly through On-grid and Off-grid electrification approaches. Despite all policy interventions across the years, and being the more favored one both by utilities and consumers, the actual performance of conventional centralized on-grid distribution of rural electricity services continues to be poor. But, implementation of off-grid decentralized rural electrification using various renewable energy technologies has been success and effective compared to centralized system. This paper covers the effectiveness of rural electrification being done in India in which various small villages are electrified either by on-grid or off-grid energy sources. It also addresses their impact on existing grid and their future evolvement as mini or micro grid. Though this paper is limited to study of rural mini grids projects having distributed energy sources to supply electricity locally, but the views and opinions expressed may apply to other renewable projects as well.