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Overview

The Access to Clean Cooking Energy and Electricity – Survey of States (ACCESS) is India’s largest multidimensional survey on energy access. The largest panel-data on energy access in India, the survey is conducted across six of the major energy-access-deprived states in the country – Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.

The 2018 study conducted by CEEW, with support from the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation (SSEF) and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), covered more than 9,000 households from 756 villages in 54 districts collecting about 2.5 million data points.

The results from the first round of the study, ACCESS 2015, highlighted the need to look beyond connections to enable rural India’s access to modern forms of energy. In 2018, we revisited the households to understand the changes in their energy access situation over the last three years, and to study the impact of government policies during this period.

The study analyses energy access for households using a multidimensional, multi-tier framework. Households are assigned tiers on the basis of their level of access to energy. Tier 0 indicates the lowest level of access and Tier 3, the highest.

Key Findings

On electricity access:

• ACCESS 2018 found that around 80 per cent of rural households in six surveyed states depend on grid electricity and solar home systems and/or solar lanterns for their primary lighting needs, up from 44 per cent in 2015.
• The proportion of rural households categorised as Tier 0 has reduced by 25 percentage points, whereas the proportion of Tier 1 households has increased by 16 percentage points.
• Daily supply in all six states combined has increased from a median of 12 hours to 16 hours over the last three years. In Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, which have shown the most improvement, the supply duration increased from 8 hours to 15 hours, and from 12 hours to 18 hours, respectively.
• The proportion of electrified households that expressed satisfaction with their electricity provision has more than doubled—from 26 per cent to 57 per cent—over the last three years.
• Over 84 per cent of households (increased from 79 per cent in 2015) were in support of the government providing subsidies on solar lanterns.
• Support for subsidising grid electricity, on asking for only one type of subsidised lighting provision (among grid electricity, solar home systems or lanterns, kerosene, or microgrids) increased from 65 per cent in 2015 to 83 per cent in 2018.
• Metering of connections, though improved, needs further improvement particularly in the states of Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

On cooking energy:

• Since 2015, the share of households using LPG in these six states has increased from 22 per cent to 58 per cent, and the share of households using LPG as their primary cooking fuel has increased from 14 to 37 per cent.
• Its use as the exclusive cooking fuel (eliminating adverse health impacts completely) has also increased from 5 to 19 per cent of rural households.
• Forty-four per cent of households across the six states are in Tier 0 in 2018, as compared to 78 per cent in 2015.
• In the six states, of all the rural households that received LPG connections between 2015 and 2018, more than 50 per cent received them under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY).
• The cumulative penetration of other non-traditional cooking sources is limited to less than 0.77 per cent of rural households in these six states.
• The proportion of Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) households who reported using LPG in 2015 and in 2018 has increased from 12 per cent to 45 per cent, and from 8 per cent to 32 per cent, respectively, indicating a significant improvement in LPG penetration among marginalised groups.
• The availability of free-of-cost biomass is an important reason for households to not use LPG for cooking. A significant proportion of households (81 per cent) still continue to rely on such biomass for some, if not all, of their cooking needs.
• LPG usage is strongly correlated with the number of years for which a household has had a connection—potentially indicating that for new LPG connections, consumption evolves over time until it saturates.
• Among households that have LPG, more than two-third reported that a male member of the household decides when to order a refill.
• More than 60 per cent of the respondents prioritised increasing the subsidy on LPG cylinders, as compared to 47 per cent in 2015.

Distribution of households across electricity access tiers across states

Multidimensional, multi-tier framework to assess electricity access

Distribution of households among tiers for cooking energy access across six states

Multidimensional, multi-tier framework to assess cooking energy access

In 2015, when a multidimensional framework to evaluate energy access in India was first used, it shed light on various aspects of energy access that are often overlooked in favour of simplistic measures such as the number of connections deployed. Many households that are connected to grid electricity or have LPG connections are satisfied with their energy access situation, but—despite having access to connections—many are not. The results of this study re-iterate why it is imperative to monitor multidimensional aspects of access to electrcity and cooking energy.

Dataset citation: Mani, Sunil; Shahidi, Tauseef; Patnaik, Sasmita; Jain, Abhishek; Tripathi, Saurabh; Ganesan, Karthik; Aklin, Michaël; Urpelainen, Johannes; Chindarkar, Namrata; Council on Energy, Environment and Water; Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy; National University of Singapore. Access to Clean Cooking Energy and Electricity: Survey of States in India 2018 (ACCESS 2018)’.