Rajiv Gandhia Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana
Involvement Goals and Summary
Under the auspices of the Indian Ministry of Power and the REC, the Rajiv Gandhia Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana, RGGVY, project has been formed with the goal of “electrifying all villages and habitations, providing access to electricity to all households and to give electricity connect to Below Poverty Line families free of charge,” within five years to reach the goals of the National Common Minimum Programme set forth by the central government. There are roughly 125,000 non-electrified villages in India which is 20% of all villages . The estimated cost of the RGGVY is roughly $3.5 billion US making this project a technically and financially daunting undertaking (RGGVY Brochure).
The way the RGGVY plans to be successful is through a 90% capital subsidy from the central government to cover the overall cost of the project. With this money they plan on creating the necessary infrastructure through creating a “Rural Electricity Distribution Backbone” with at least one power sub-station in each village block . From there they will build the “Village Electrification Infrastructure” which will provide electricity to every village and put a distribution transformer in each habitation, and the creation of a “Decentralized Distributed Generation & Supply System” in villages where grid connectivity is not feasible or cost effective (RGGVY Brochue).
REC will be the agency under which all this will occur and they will be the distributor of the funds as well as establishing the technical specifications, bidding conditions, guidelines, field appraisals and all other work necessary to realize this goal.
The base idea is that by absorbing the upfront costs of building the grid, the Indian government will provide utilities with millions of new customers and that this new customer base, over a long enough time scale of paying electricity tariffs and the development that may follow, will compensate for the initial outlay and as well as for providing energy to those below the poverty line free of charge.
Critique of RGGVY Projects
The ambition of the RGGVY project is only matched by its financial riskiness. Now that the global economic crisis has made capital harder to come by the Indian government will most likely slow down the timescale of this project. The model of providing free power to those who are below the poverty line may actually not be much of a burden on the electrification scheme as they are unlikely able to afford many energy using devices. So even though those below the poverty line will have access to electricity, they will not have much of a chance to use it.
Also, a closer look at how the RGGVY defines an electrified village shows that their goal is not as ambitious as it may first appear. There are three targets a village must meet to be qualified as electrified. The first is that the basic infrastructure for distributing electricity such as wires and transformers are installed, a step which is unnecessary for non-conventional energy sources. Next, public places must have access to electricity and finally the “number of households electrified should be at least 10% of the total number of households in the village,” (RGGVY brochure). This 10% suggestion is a large loophole for this project since it can be technically labeled as a success and still keep millions of rural Indians in energy poverty.
The
last main flaw in the RGGVY plan is that it lacks plans to construct
new power generating facilities. Even if it is successful and brings
power lines to every home and village, if these lines have no power
going through them, they are useless. While it is focused on a very
important part of the problems causing rural energy poverty in India,
it does not provide a holistic solution so it must be coupled with
other efforts in order to fully solve the issue. However, the lack
of generation capacity construction in the RGGVY plan is ultimately
not an issue as the project is inherently, though not explicitly,
coupled with the Ministry of Power's Ultra Mega Power Plant and Mega
Power Plant projects which will add several gigawatts of power to the
grid the RGGVY plans to construct.
Bibliography:
Rural Electrificaton Corporation Limited. Rajiv Gandhi
Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana. Rural Electrificaton Corporation
Limited. Apr. 2005. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. <http://recindia.nic.in/download
/rggvy_brochure.pdf>.
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