Public private partnership to enhance rural energy access

Balachandra Patil, fellow with the Energy Technology Innovation Policy program at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School of Government states that 45% of 800 million rural population in India did not have access to electricity highlighting the failure of policies, governance and institutions around delivery of energy to rural India including inefficient targeting of subsidies. He links India's strong entrepreneurial culture, its capabilities in advanced biomass technologies and the global carbon market to propose an alternative framework to improve access to energy for rural India. In a Discussion Paper for the Belfer Center, "Modern Energy Access to All in Rural India: An Integrated Implementation Strategy", the public-private partnership model he proposes entails the creation of rural energy access authorities empowered to enable regulatory policies, deliver rural technologies and provide access of financing, while targeting entrepreneurs rather than the rural households as the end-user, with energy service companies linking rural energy projects to the global market by serving as an aggregator of carbon credits for global trade.