Paper
From linesmen to local leaders:
How does informal governance influence India's electricity policy outcomes?
Kanika Balani, Bharat Sharma, Shalu Agrawal
April 2025 | Power Markets
Overview:
Electricity reforms in India have advanced significantly in the last three decades, aiming to make the sector efficient and financially viable while safeguarding consumer interests. However, the actual on-ground experience reveals a substantial gap between policy objectives and the prevailing electricity services. In states such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), power distribution companies (discoms) continue to face challenges in curbing losses and providing reliable power supply, contributing to the growing consumer dissatisfaction in under-served rural areas. While past research has focused on broader political and institutional factors, much less is known about how local actors and their everyday interactions shape electricity distribution on the ground.
This research paper focuses on a rural electricity distribution region of Malihabad in UP to address this gap in the literature and examine the on-ground implementation of national policies on electrification, supply quality improvement and discom’s revenue recovery. The study draws on focus group discussions with consumers in Malihabad, semi-structured interviews with village representatives, linesmen, and discom staff, supplemented by administrative data, policy documents, and the authors’ extensive field experience in electricity distribution in Uttar Pradesh. By employing Vincent and Elinor Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework the research examines how local interactions shape electricity governance in rural India. The IAD framework helps unpack how local actors such as the discom staff, village headmen, meter readers and consumers navigate and reshape institutional arrangements on the ground. These interactions often result in a layered mix of formal and informal rules and outcomes that diverge from official policy goals and mandates. Our analysis further argues that future policies need to consider the motivations of these local actors, institutional conditions and socio-economic factors to ensure effective power sector governance.
Key highlights:
- While the central government declared all inhabited villages electrified in April 2018 post-implementation of SAUBHAGYA and DDUGJY, a few villages were found partially electrified in Malihabad.
- Inadequate transformers and poles, information asymmetry, lack of discom ownership, insufficient monitoring, etc. contributed to these gaps.
- Malihabad consumers expressed satisfaction with the supply situation, receiving average of 20-22 hours of supply. However, they raised concerns about unscheduled outages and voltage fluctuations, particularly during summer.
- Gaps in infrastructure planning and maintenance, lack of incentives for linesmen, and limited consumer awareness impacted supply quality.
- Only 23 per cent of Maliahbad consumers paid electricity bills in October 2019. Timely payment recovery emerged as a major concern for discom.
- Faulty metering and billing, mismatch between workload and incentives of meter readers, delays in grievance redressal, and a lack of deterrence against non-payment affected revenue recovery.
- Using the IAD framework, the study further analyses “action situations” where policy meets practice—such as billing, disconnections, and grievance redressal—revealing how outcomes are shaped by actor discretion, local hierarchies, and weak oversight.
- Informal norms and practices, and local negotiations among local actors structure how electricity is accessed, and managed—often overriding formal rules.
- The research shows that local actors such as linesmen, meter readers, village heads, and outsourced staff wield significant discretionary power in policy implementation.
- Low pay, limited training and a high workload of meter readers and linesmen affected the delivery of quality services.
- Collusion among discom staff, meter readers and consumers and demand for facilitation fees were common.
- Payment delays, billing issues, and illegal connections are also closely tied to rural income patterns, trust in the discom, and long-standing gaps in electricity access.
- The research underscores the need for policy frameworks that account for the lived experiences of electricity users and ground-level agents, rather than assuming top-down compliance.
- Instead of treating informality as merely a barrier, the paper argues for recognising informal practices as embedded governance mechanisms that could be strategically engaged with, rather than only penalised or ignored.
Policy outcomes in the electricity sector are not determined soley by formal institutions and regulatory frameworks, but they are also shaped by everyday decisions, interactions and informal negotiations among different local actors such as discom staff, local representatives, and consumers. Recognising these local dynamics and informal practices is critical to design more responsive and effective power sector governance framework.
