India will provide universal access to electricity for all its citizens well ahead of the 2030 target. | Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Washington: Just a few days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that all the villages of India had access to electricity, a World Bank report stated that the figures of electrification were even better. With a methodology that also accounts for all the off-grid users, the World Bank report also pointed out that India was doing the maximum electrification of households on the planet at a whopping 30 million homes per year between 2010 and 2016.

The World Bank report went on to explain that India was in the last leg of its electrification project with over 80 percent of the population having access to electrical energy. This, the report said, meant that the efforts to provide electricity to the remotest households would have to be more pronounced as reaching those places would prove challenging. The report also looked into global cues and pointed out that Bangladesh and Kenya were faster in electrification than India.

"India is doing extremely well on electrification. We are reporting India about 85 per cent of the population has access to electricity," Vivien Foster, Lead Energy Economist at the World Bank, said. Foster, the lead author of the latest report on Energy Progress, added that this figure was higher than that of the Indian government. "That might surprise you. The government is currently reporting in low 80s," she said.

At the current rate of electrification, India is all set to provide universal access to electricity for all its citizens well ahead of the 2030 target deadline. However, the report pointed out that reliability of the supply of electricity was an issue which had to be investigated.

(With PTI inputs)