India - Green Growth through INDC

India’s INDC emphasizes the government’s goal of ensuring Electricity for All. The Indian government has promised to provide 24x7 electricity to all by 2019. At present, close to 50 million Indian households have little or no access to power. India has an electrification rate of 78.7%, with a large proportion of the underserved households concentrated in rural areas. The government has designed several policies to support rural electrification over the past 10 years, focusing on decentralized models. However, most of the schemes and projects have not been able to address the quality, availability, affordability, and legality of energy access. It is also difficult to capture the level of energy access in terms of capacity to support different appliances, number of hours of supply, and the associated social and economic impacts (CEEW, 2015). GGGI, seeing that off-grid-energy(OGE) companies can play an important role in improving access to energy for un-electrified households in India, conducted a market study. The demand for OGE systems from end-consumers is high and there are close to 100 companies operating within the different off-grid-energy market segments. However, most of the existing companies are small and are not able to grow their operations profitably due to unavailability of debt capital at appropriate terms and conditions from domestic lenders.