Measuring energy access for livelihoods, lifestyles, and welfare: Validating the Hierarchical Energy Access Framework in India

Abstract

Household energy poverty is a multi-dimensional issue that extends to any service a household would like to obtain that requires energy, not just those at the household level. It is crucial to incorporate this understanding in how household energy access is measured to adequately inform any measure taken to address this issue. In recent years, a few methodologies, like the Multi-tier Framework, have been designed to reflect this thinking. However, their widespread adoption has been lacklustre primarily due to their use of complicated and yet-unmeasured parameters. Therefore, a readily deployable measurement framework in this vein remains absent from literature. This paper addresses this gap by showcasing a new household energy access measurement methodology, named the Hierarchical Energy Access Framework (HEAF) which assesses service gained by households across four hierarchical states of energy access and across four avenues of energy use, viz., household level services, productive endeavours, transportation, and community facilities. It achieves this using simple but comprehensive indicators specifically designed to be operationalizable using publicly available government-generated data. To illustrate its utility, energy access in rural Indian households in 2011 has been estimated. The results indicate that they were transitioning to modern energy sources in a highly unequal fashion both within and across the avenues of energy use considered, and 25.69 % of them were facing abject energy poverty. Overall, data availability for deploying the HEAF in India was found to be largely adequate, except for street lighting. A discussion has also been made on the global applicability of the HEAF.