An evaluation found that the rural development efforts have failed to deliver on their promises. In fact more than half of rural development projects are outright failures. What has gone wrong? In practice, conventional projects usually target medium to large-scale “progressive” producers, supporting them with technology, credit and extension advice in the hope that improvements will gradually extend to more “backward” strata of rural society. In many cases, however, the channeling of development assistance to the better-off has led to concentration of land and capital, marginalization of small farmers and alarming growth in the number of
landless laborers.

The basic fault in the conventional approach is that the rural poor are rarely consulted in development planning and usually have no active role in development activities. This is because the vast majority of the poor have no organizational structure to represent their interests. Isolated, undereducated and often dependent on rural elites, they lack the means to win greater access to resources and markets, and to prevent the imposition of unworkable programs or technologies. The lesson is clear: unless the rural poor are given the means to participate fully in development, they will continue to be excluded from its benefits. This realization is provoking new interest in an
alternative rural development strategy, that of people’s participation through organizations controlled and financed by the poor.

People’s participation in rural development was formulated in the mid-1970s, amid growing awareness that development efforts were having little impact on poverty. At the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (WCARRD), held in Rome in 1979, the international community identified the reason for this failure - the lack of active participation of the poor in programs designed, supposedly, to assist them.

WCARRD declared that participation by rural people in the institutions that govern their lives is a basic human right. If rural development was to realize its potential, the Conference said, disadvantaged rural people had to be organized and actively involved in designing policies and programs and in controlling social and economic institutions. WCARRD saw a close link between participation and voluntary, autonomous and democratic organizations representing the poor. It called on development agencies to work in close cooperation with organizations of intended beneficiaries, and proposed that assistance be channeled through small farmer and peasant groups.

In addition, the rural programs including rural electrification have been and still are focused to cater to the basic needs of the rural population. Such efforts have never been sustainable and in fact most of the times the impacts of the programs have vanished for want of a mechanism for its
sustainability. This is because the planners never believed that rural consumer could in any way contribute to the success of rural programs. The rural consumers are always considered ill-equipped.

However, of late, there has been an effort to decentralize the process of rural energy access and integrate it with other rural development programs for poverty alleviation. In other words, the efforts have now focused to provide for “basic needs plus” to rural population. The “basic needs plus” approach has been based on the interaction with local consumers and local NGOs. The planners realized that the sustainability could be achieved only when the rural consumers can at least meet the cost of operation, maintenance and replacement of equipment. This is possible only when the rural programs aim at poverty alleviation. The rural population must find ways and means for gainful employment. The local resources and skills must be utilized for income generation. This can be achieved successfully by involving local communities in planning and implementing the rural programs. The examples from many countries world over clearly shows that rural electrification programs can benefit greatly from the involvement of local communities - or suffer because of its absence. These examples show that the rural energy programs have always been successful where the rural population was also involved in income generation activities. The increased income helped the rural consumers in being able to afford the cost of energy service.

Cost recovery is probably the single most important factor determining the long-term effectiveness of rural electrification programs albeit any other rural service such as water. When cost recovery is pursued, most of the other program elements fall easily into place. All the successful programs place a strong emphasis on covering their costs, though there is a wide variation in how it can be approached.

In contrast, energy supply organizations depending on operational subsidies are critically vulnerable to any downturn in their availability. When the subsidy is reduced, as inevitably happens, the virtue of increased sales turns into the vice of greater losses, creating a significant disincentive to extend electricity to new customers, especially poor rural people. The contradictory signals to management make proper running of the organization impossible.

For example, where the rural energy program depends on the availability of grant funds from donors, progress has been slow and intermittent. The state electricity boards flatly state that it has no interest in rural electrification, because electricity prices, by government order, are too low to cover even operating costs.

Capital investment subsidies raise different questions. In most successful programs, a substantial proportion of the capital has been obtained at concessionary rates or in the form of grants; at commercial rates of return a substantial proportion of the rural areas would never be electrified.

Provided it is used wisely, and operating costs are covered, having access to such concessionary capital need have no illeffects on the implementing agency or the rural electrification. program. But concessionary capital should never be provided to organizations, which are not covering their operating and maintenance costs; it will simply worsen their financial position.

There is a widespread belief that electricity tariffs need to be extremely low, often well below their true supply costs, if rural electrification is to benefit rural people. The facts do not support this.
Rural electrification only makes sense in areas where there is already a demand for electricity-using services such as lighting, television, refrigeration and motive power. In the absence of a grid supply, these services are obtained by spending money on kerosene, LPG, dry-cell batteries, car battery recharging and small power units, all of which are highly expensive per unit of electricity supplied. Recent surveys in regions without electricity in Uganda and Laos indicate that people spend approximately 5 dollars per month on these energy sources. Private suppliers often find a ready market for electricity at more than one US dollar per kilowatt hour.

Rural electrification tariffs set at realistic levels do not prevent people making significant savings in their energy costs, as well as obtaining a vastly improved service. Charging the right price allows the electricity companies to provide an electricity supply in an effective, reliable, and sustainable manner to an increasing number of satisfied consumers. In Costa Rica, the price of electricity is set through a regulatory process, but it is high enough for the cooperatives to make a modest profit. In 1996, the price for residential electricity starts with a fixed charge of USD 2.59 for the first 30 kilowatt hours of service, and increases steadily to over 25 cents a kilowatt hour for people consuming over 150 kilowatt hours of electricity per month. This also focuses the attention of the electricity company on consumer service and the need to provide value for the price it charges.

The initial connection charges demanded by the utility are often a far greater barrier to rural families than the monthly electricity bill. Reducing these charges, or spreading them over a several years, even if it means charging more per unit of electricity, allows larger numbers of low-income rural families to obtain the supply.

In Bolivia, for example, a small local grid, in spite of charging 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt hour, immediately doubled its number of consumers when it offered them the option of paying for the connection cost over 5 years. By contrast, in Malawi where the electricity company charges the full 30- year cost of line extension to new customers, the rural electrification rate is just 2 percent.

Traditional thinking in many utilities is often oblivious to the importance of local community involvement. Rural electrification is seen simply as a technical matter of stringing lines to grateful consumers. The experience world over clearly shows that rural electrification programs can benefit greatly from the involvement of local communities - or suffer because of its absence.

Setting up a rural electrification committee to represent the local community can do, much to smoothen the implementation of the program. The committee can play a crucial role in helping assess the level of demand, educating consumers in advance, encouraging them to sign up for a supply, and promoting the wider use of electricity.

In Bangladesh consumer meetings are held before the arrival of the electricity supply, helping to avoid costly and timeconsuming disputes over rights of way and construction damage. Community contributions, in cash or kind, were often the decisive factor in bringing areas within the scope of the rural electrification program in Thailand. The efforts to recruit customers made by parish rural electrification committees in Ireland ensured that the utility received an adequate return on its investment and contributed to the rapid implementation of the country’s rural electrification program.

People’s participation requires organizing community, empowering them for contributing collective actions to achieve a common goal. Therefore, participation is the combination of following three elements.

Participatory approach in natural resource management and energy development empower the local people in utilizing their knowledge, skills and experience. The program will facilitate people to identify and prioritize their problems and needs on energy and resource management and will emphasize continuous interaction with local farmers and their full-fledged participation from the very beginning to the end of resource management process. The participatory approach will help to:

* increase farmers skills and knowledge of rural environmental condition and energy-environment linkage;
* enhance their capabilities in organizing and decision making in resource management and rural energy development programs;
* make farmers more aware of their participatory role in rural energy access and rural development;
* enhance participatory approach for designing, formulating and implementing plans and programs related to rural energy and rural development promotion

Participatory approach in natural resource management for rural energy program demands involvement of the rural poor in planning and undertaking additional income generating activities. The participatory approach may help in the following for better and sustainable benefits to rural poor.

* assessing the condition of natural resource and existing energy use pattern
* identifying problems, constraints and opportunities of income generating activities
* role of suitable energy system in increasing the opportunity of income generation for rural poor
* importance of reliable and quality electricity supply to rural areas in promoting rural industries and thereby creating opportunities for rural entrepreneurships and rural employments for income generation
* identifying and making provisions of critical inputs, e.g., training, finance, raw material availability at reasonable prices required for taking up activities to enhance the income generation
* helping in setting up system so that the rural poor can get fair prices for their produce

The local NGOs play a vital role in educating and persuading the rural poor to effectively participate in the rural programs. NGOs would carry out community mobilization in order to mobilize local resources, skills and experience for implementing energy development activities, natural resource conservation and overall environmental management. They would assist the rural consumer to actively contribute to develop and implement activities in areas like community forest management, environment, health, income generation, infrastructure and development of institutions at the grassroots level for poverty alleviation. NGOs will provide training and educate people through sensitization on various issues by using posters, pictures, and audio-visual tools.

The followings are the objective of mass sensitization:
* recognizing the importance of energy to household, community development, and income generation
* identifying the need for energy on the top of the priority list by the local people
* emergence of rural poor groups to have a say in rural development planning and implementation
* emergence of various functional groups in relation to various economic and social activities

Finally, in planning and implementing rural development programs, the participation of rural poor is most critical in sustaining such programs. Incorporating participatory elements in large scale rural development programs, rural developments projects may not pursued as ends in themselves, but rather to demonstrate to donor, government and NGO decision makers the benefits and cost-effectiveness of using group-based participatory approaches. These decision makers are best convinced by concrete results achieved in the field. Therefore, results must be communicated to them effectively. However, other strategies may also be needed. They include:

* Policy makers of national and NGO development agencies should be encouraged to participate in dialogues on the need for the adoption of policies favorable to participatory development. These policies include appropriate legislation to promote rural people’s organizations, including freedom of association as well as reorientation of delivery systems towards the needs of the rural poor. Other policies should promote full integration of women in development, decentralization of decision-making, planning and resource allocation, and expansion of nonagricultural employment.

* Influencing development planners and administrators. Many of the development agencies involved in implementation of large-scale programs and projects may have little or no experience in participatory development. Development planners and implementation agencies can be influenced through meetings and field workshops, periodic informal exchanges of views, briefings on participatory projects, and incorporation of participatory issues in project identification, preparation, appraisal and evaluation missions.

Influencing local leaders. The support of village leaders is often crucial to a participatory project. This support should be obtained through meetings and project initiation workshops aimed at convincing local traditional and administrative leaders that the project is in their own short- and long-term interest. Influencing donors and international development agencies. The support of donors, development agencies and international financial institutions is essential for widespread adoption of the participatory approach. Efforts to obtain this support should aim, first, at convincing those donors and agencies that support participatory projects to continue their assistance. Other donors, development banks and agencies should be influenced through policy dialogues and field workshops to support the participatory approach. It will be crucial to demonstrate the achievements of participatory projects, through effective monitoring and evaluation systems and case studies on their benefits and cost-effectiveness.

Special Quotes
“The energy dimension of poverty - energy poverty - may be defined as the absence of sufficient choice in accessing adequate, affordable, reliable, quality, safe and environmentally benign energy services to support economic and human development”.
- World Energy Assessment 2000, Sept 1999 draft