We examine unequal outcomes in the implementation of India's national rural electrification program in Uttar Pradesh. We ask two questions: (1) to what extent did Dalits, the lowest group in India's caste hierarchy, receive less attention when the state electrified rural communities? (2) Was...

How can demand for electricity be estimated without fine-grained usage data? Employing an original and large dataset, we develop a novel method for determining drivers of demand without electricity meter data. We first segment Indian consumers by their willingness to pay for electricity service,...

To reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of universal household electrification by 2030, developing countries are spending billions of dollars to expand access. India, for example, recently undertook an audacious expansion plan which aimed to electrify every household by December...

The International Energy Agency estimates that more than a billion people remain without household electricity access. However, countries such as India have recently made major progress in rural electrification. Who has benefited from these achievements? We focus on 714 villages in six...

As the cost of distributed power generation continues to decrease, technologies such as solar home systems and micro-grids become increasingly attractive in the quest for energy access. Here we show, however, that national rural electrification planning mostly continues to ignore distributed...

Governments in developing countries are investing billions of dollars to increase electricity access in rural areas, but the literature on the impact of these investments has produced mixed results. We leverage a unique characteristic of household electrification policy in Uttar Pradesh, India,...

Using comprehensive data on power generation and energy access, we explore associations between coal-fired power generation and household electrification. We find that, although there is a strong between-country correlation between coal-fired power generation capacity and electricity access, the...