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Throughout the 20th century, electricity was considered to be the primary vehicle of modernity, as well as its quintessential symbol. In India, electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums were spent on the project from then until now. Yet despite all this, sixty-five years after independence nearly 400 million Indians have no access to electricity.Electrifying India explores the political and historical puzzle of uneven development in India's vital electricity sector. In some states, nearly all citizens have access to electricity, while in others fewer than half of households have reliable electricity. To help explain this variation, this book offers both a regional and a historical perspective on the politics of electrification of India as it unfolded in New Delhi and three Indian states: Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. In those parts of the countryside that were successfully electrified in the decades after independence, the gains were due to neither nationalist idealism nor merely technocratic plans, but rather to the rising political influence and pressure of rural constituencies. In looking at variation in how public utilities expanded over a long period of time, this book argues that the earlier period of an advancing state apparatus from the 1950s to the 1980s conditioned in important ways the manner of the state's retreat during market reforms from the 1990s onward.

Despite having equally vast endowments of natural resources and similar socioeconomic profiles, the Indian states of Bihar and Odisha pursued markedly different development strategies during India’s first decade of economic liberalization. Whereas Bihar turned away from its natural resource sector and adopted policies of social empowerment, Odisha courted private investment in extractive industries and aggressively pursued market reforms. To account for this divergence, we argue that the social composition of political power in each state directly shaped the strategies that leaders embraced towards the natural resource sector and overall development. This paper makes contributions to the writings on natural resources and the political economy of India. We show that the presence of abundant natural resources does not necessarily result in a predictable pathway of sectoral and economic policy outcomes. Instead, social factors can be a powerful determinant of how resource-rich states approach their economies.

Since Independence in 1947, India's electricity sector has twice undergone broad policy change. In the 1950s, publicly owned, vertically integrated monopoly utilities were established in each state. Since the early 1990s, there has been a push to reverse earlier policies by including market strategies and private actors in the sector. This essay suggests that these moments of transformation are best understood with reference to the interests and political power of dominant groups within India, coupled with the prevailing global economic ideology. In the 1950s, the global norm for the sector advocated public ownership, which accorded well with the interests of India's industrialists and bureaucrats alike. By the 1990s, however, an emergent global consensus advocated the entry of private actors to the electricity industry. Within India, industrialists, increasingly dissatisfied with high tariffs and unreliable supply, have supported the new consensus. However, agricultural groups who profit from extensive subsidies, and elected state politicians who benefit by maintaining control of politically sensitive tariffs, have proven resistant to change. The interplay of such a wide panoply of interests has had mixed effects on the functioning of the sector. Indian states have undertaken a variety of restructuring measures, with varying results. The central government the focus of this paper has promoted a series of policy initiatives, culminating with the Electricity Act 2003, to increase private ownership and market strategies. The tussle over electricity reform in India is further complicated by a current rethinking of the strategies of marketization and privatization of electricity functions.

The political and economic history of the railway system in colonial India presages both metaphorically and practically the creation of the electrical grid in India after independence—with one important difference. While the railroads become the purview of the central government, oversight of electricity resided with India’s state governments. In British India, the construction of a vast rail network was powerful, both for the material changes it wrought and its symbolic valence. As a recent reexamination of the production of the colonial economy notes, of all the public works that were critical to the colonial enterprise in India in the

If the state in Odisha was a model of a regional political regime committed to rapid heavy industrialization and willing to devote development resources to achieve that end, then the development policy regime put in place in Maharashtra from the 1960s to the 1980s emphasized the need to balance what was already a robust industrial sector with an equally vibrant rural and agro-industrial economy. The state in Maharashtra directed electrification resources toward increasing agrarian productivity and then promoted a decentralized agro-industrial economy focused around sugar manufacture in the western districts of the state. The pace and direction of electrification in

Throughout the early 1990s, an aggressive global consensus advocated that capital-scarce economies with growing energy needs should turn to private sources to set up new generating plants. Within a few years, however, it had become clear to many of these same advocates that the electricity sector could not be fixed merely by allowing private companies to sell power from new plants to existing, state-owned electricity companies. Since that realization, the central Indian government and multi- and bilateral donor organizations began advocating privatization of electricity distribution utilities. Despite this strong urging and the popularity of utility privatization in many other parts

Maharashtra, the focus of this chapter, and Odisha, the subject of the next, occupy two opposite sides of the continuum of Indian economic development. This is the case along measures as varied as per capita incomes, indicators of health and education, levels of urbanization, and the structural compositions of the two states’ economies. The most recently available figures from the Indian government illustrate well the gulf in socioeconomic development and access to house hold amenities across states in India, variation that is exemplified by the uneven access to electricity. According to the 2011 Indian Census, 83.9 percent of house holds

Chapters 2–5 of this book collectively have two main aims. I begin with the observation that in the creation of modern India, from the end of the colonial period through the first sixty years of independent political life, executive authority in many fields of social and infrastructural development has rested in the hands of state governments rather than with New Delhi. From New Delhi emerged grand themes of national unity—but from the states came the emerging machinery of contemporary India. Tracing the way that India’s electricity sector has grown during this period helps uncover the ways that state