Energy Services for the Urban Poor: NGO Participation in Slum Electrification in India

Abstract

Some 40% of the world's urban poor—living predominantly in informal settlements—lack access to legal electricity. Urban upgradation programmes, if they exist, prioritize water supply over electrification since water is nonsubstitutable and more essential for sustaining human life. Illegal electricity—albeit unreliable, expensive and dangerous—is also already widely available in informal settlements. I share the experiences of the Self-Employed Women's Association and Saath—two nongovermental organizations (NGOs) based in India—of participating in a multiple-stakeholder propoor electrification programme. By 2008 close to 100 000 homes had been electrified in the city of Ahmedabad and the programme is currently being replicated in smaller cities in Gujarat and in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. I use academic literature on urban infrastructure provision and politics, project reports and evaluations, pricing surveys, and interviews with electricity utility and NGO staff to analyze the programme for its impacts upon access, tariffs, consumption patterns, quality of service, and security of land tenure. The findings indicate that NGOs can be very effective as intermediaries between utilities, municipalities, and urban poor communities. However, scaling up such programmes will require strong state involvement in developing a policy framework to facilitate NGO participation in the design and implementation of propoor electrification activities, and in the energy reform process in general.