Rural electrification has progressed unevenly across the world since 1945, with some rural communities gaining access to power decades earlier than others. We examine the association between early electrification and the quality of electricity service to households, testing the hypothesis that aging infrastructure compromises the quality of electricity service. Using the 2014–۲۰۱۵ ACCESS survey from rural India, we find that early electrification is associated with improvements in the quality of electricity service, even controlling for village size and distance to nearest town. A possible explanation for the finding is that early electrification generates economic gains that allow the rural community to invest in maintenance and upgrades.

Introduction

Rural electrification has progressed across the developing world over the past decades, with rural electrification at the global level reaching 84% by 2014 (IEA, 2016). One important consequence of the considerable variation in the time of electrification is that the equipment used varies across locations. In areas that were electrified early, the core electricity distribution infrastructure can be decades old and, depending on the country, sometimes of Soviet origin. In more recently electrified areas, the equipment can be more modern and recent. In our recent fieldwork in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, we saw this dynamic in action. In Hardoi district, where many villages had been electrified 3–۴ decades ago, villagers complained about very low hours of supply. They noted that the infrastructure had fallen into disrepair and that even on those days when the electricity substations received over twelve hours of supply, many villages received only a fraction of this theoretical maximum. In most respects, early electrification is good for communities. Translating energy access into economic gains takes time, so communities that were electrified early have an economic advantage over communities that were electrified in more recent years. At the same time, however, early electrification means dependence on infrastructure that is by now outdated. If communities that were electrified early have not benefited from regular maintenance, it is possible that the quality of their electricity service is actually worse than that of more recently electrified communities. What is more, such maintenance problems are widespread given that electricity distribution companies in most developing societies have been in serious financial trouble for decades (Victor & Heller, 2007; Urpelainen & Yang, 2017). As a first step toward assessing the possible disadvantages of early electrification, here we use data from villages in six energy-poor states of India. Drawing on the ACCESS data (Jain et al., 2015; Aklin, Cheng, Ganesan, Jain, Urpelainen, & Council on Energy, Environment and Water, 2016; Aklin, Cheng, Urpelainen, Ganesan, & Jain, 2016) for 594 electrified villages, we assess the relationship between the time of electrification and the household electrification rate, daily hours of electricity available, and monthly days without electricity. While it is intuitive that early electrification should boost household electrification rates, the association between the time of electrification and the quality of service (more hours, fewer outages) could be either negative or positive. We find that early electrification has been unambiguously beneficial to the villages in the sample. Not only electrification rates, but also hours of supply increase with early electrification. Similarly, outages are less frequent in villages that were electrified early. These results hold even if we control for distance to nearest town and include district fixed effects (N = 51), so that the finding cannot be attributed to transmission distance, variation in geography, or other factors.