India's rural energy transition: Evidence from village-level survey aggregates of clean energy adoption across states

Abstract

Energy transition in villages underpins sustainable development and net-zero goals, but nationally comparable metrics that distinguish between adoption of clean energy at the household level and community infrastructure are rare. To bridge this gap, the present study offers a new measure, namely the Clean Energy Adoption Index (CEAI), using village-level data from a survey conducted in 2022/23 by the Government of India as part of its ‘Mission Antyodaya’, which has the village as its focus. The survey spanned 641,357 villages and 244.17 million rural households. The proposed index, using normalized indicators, distinguishes between adoption at the household level of measures that contribute to sustainable development and village-level infrastructure built for the same end. The adoption of one such measure, namely decentralized supply of electricity to households, is low: 2.40% of 5.86 million households use solar systems and 1.18% (2.89 million) use wind power. Using clean fuels for cooking, another such measure, fares better, with 33.5% (81.83 million) households relying on liquefied petroleum gas or biogas. Community metrics show, for every 1000 villages, 55.5 biogas or waste-recycling units, 5399 installations of solar streetlights (totaling 3.46 million), and 1671 solar-powered pump-sets for irrigation (1.07 million units of electricity). Systematic normalization and aggregation allowed us to calculate the CEAI,which was validated through robustness checks under varied scaling and weighting. Regression explained 65% of the variation between different Indian states (R2 =0.65), with rural electrification as the primary driver. A significant positive interaction between electrification, poverty alleviation, and literacy amplifies the level of adoption, signaled by the coming together of infrastructure, targeting the right beneficiaries, and human capital. India's national CEAI of approximately 31 suggests progress skewed toward infrastructure rather than toward adoption at the household level, with decentralized supply of electricity making a poor showing in terms of deployment at community level. Regional disparities underscore structural barriers. The index provides a scalable tool for prioritizing policies aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals in rural energy systems and can also be applied to other developing economies.