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Odisha’s claim of full electrification of revenue villages contrasts sharply with life in Nunaresh, a remote tribal settlement in Kalahandi.
Officially covered yet off grid, the hamlets depend on failed decentralised renewable energy systems, long treks for basic services and costly diesel generators.
Their experience exposes how counting connections masks persistent energy poverty and unreliable, unaffordable power.
“When we saw light for the first time in 2017, we were so happy that we took a stroll around our area; the entire village was lit until we realised that we would be back in the dark again,” Jugal Majhi recalled wistfully.
The village is Nunaresh or Nunresh, a remote Manda Khond or Kandha tribal settlement in the highlands of Thuamul Rampur block located in Odisha’s Kalahandi district. It comprises four hamlets with around 30 houses and nearly 200 people and is among around 15 villages in the block that remain off the grid.
Cut off from much of the outside world, Nunaresh lacks not only electricity but also safe drinking water, a school, an anganwadi centre and healthcare facilities. The nearest primary school is at least 5 kilometres away, while the nearest government hospital is in Thuamul Rampur, around 45 km away. A private hospital is around 60 km away in Bhawanipatna. There is no regular ambulance service to the village. The main road is about 3 km away, requiring residents to walk to access public transport, while reaching the clustered hamlets involves a difficult hike because there is no motorable road or basic civic infrastructure such as street lighting.
The experience of Nunaresh resumes significance as the Odisha government in February 2026 informed the state Assembly that all revenue villages in Odisha had been electrified, while a fresh survey was underway to identify households that remain without power connections.
Deputy Chief Minister and Energy Minister KV Singh Deo said electricity had reached every revenue village but acknowledged that some individual households remained unconnected. He said distribution companies had been asked to conduct a field survey to determine the exact number of such households.
The minister said 35,741 households had received electricity connections since 2024. In three blocks under the Bangiriposi Assembly constituency, 1,059 households were still awaiting electricity connections.
“The identified households of each district will be provided electricity connection under the state government scheme after due recommendations by the district electricity committee (DEC). In tribal areas, the non-electrified households will be covered under the PM-JANMAN scheme,” Singh Deo said.
But Nunaresh illustrates why electricity coverage at the revenue village level does not necessarily translate into reliable access for every settlement or household.
Majhi’s ancestors lived in Nunaresh without electricity, and he was born into the same darkness. That changed in August 2017, when his household received a solar home system from SELCO Foundation, a non-profit organisation working on decentralised renewable energy (DRE) and sustainable development. The system included a 40-watt solar photovoltaic panel, a 20 Ah battery, charge controller, inverter, wiring and distribution components, two LED lights, switches, sockets and a meter or monitoring system.
For the first time, the village had bright lights. But the systems did not last. “Within four years, the entire DRE set stopped working, only the panel is intact. We even had purchased two inverters in four years, but they did not last beyond 2021,” 29-year-old Majhi, who drives cars across India for a living and returns home every two to three months, told Down To Earth (DTE). When he is home, he cultivates the family’s 1.5 acres of land, mainly for household consumption.
DRE refers to small scale renewable energy systems that generate and supply power close to where it is consumed. Solar home systems, solar mini grids, solar irrigation pumps, solar dryers and solar powered community facilities are examples. Such systems can provide an alternative where conventional grid infrastructure is absent or electricity supply is unreliable.
Majhi said he along with 4-5 people in the village approached the block development officer twice for government support, but without success.
Nunaresh also received household DRE systems from the Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA), an autonomous body that works on tribal development, in 2021 after SELCO’s home DRE system stopped working. The systems were provided free of cost, but they too failed within months.
“We had received two LED bulbs and one fan which worked only for 4-5 days, the panel was operational for only two months, the longest was the inverter that lasted for 3.5 months,” Sabindra Majhi, another resident, told DTE in July 2026.
In 2017, 18 households in Nunaresh, a number that has since increased, received DRE systems from SELCO Foundation costing Rs 8,350 each. The households received a Rs 2,500 subsidy, covering about 30 per cent of the system cost, and took a Rs 5,300 loan from Syndicate Bank at 9.65 per cent interest. Including interest, the loan brought the total repayment to about Rs 6,277 per household, which was repaid through monthly installments over about 12 months, said Birisingh Majhi, an on ground SELCO Foundation coordinator working on DRE initiatives in Kalahandi.
Kalahandi falls within the Kalahandi, Balangir and Koraput region, historically associated with high levels of poverty and deprivation. Thuamul Rampur is predominantly inhabited by tribal communities whose livelihoods include agriculture, forest dependence and non-timber forest produce. Paddy, millets and pulses are among the crops cultivated in the area. Many settlements are scattered across hilly terrain and remain poorly connected to roads, markets, healthcare, education and other basic services. Communities also practise podu, or shifting cultivation, a traditional farming practice involving cultivation of different patches of land over successive seasons.
Such arrangements combine household contributions, subsidies and institutional credit rather than relying on households to bear the full cost upfront. SELCO Foundation generally facilitates financing rather than lending directly, including through partnerships with financial institutions and mechanisms such as philanthropic funding or risk guarantees.
But financing does not end the challenge once a system is installed. Maintenance can itself become unaffordable for remote, low-income communities.
“Maintenance of DRE parts is a costly affair for a village like Nunaresh whose income is as low as Rs 15,000-20,000 annually and traveling around 60 km from village to Bhawanipatna is a nightmare for them,” said Birisingh.
“We want to get a new set, and we planned it long ago, but a decent-quality new set (hybrid mini-grid setup) will cost us Rs 36,000, we checked. When our maximum income in a year is Rs 25,000-35,000, how can we get one?” asked Jugal, who is familiar with lights only in towns.
The problem is not unique to Nunaresh, said Satyapriya Sahu, Program Leader (AGM), CSR, GMR Kamalanga Energy Limited and former SELCO Foundation State Lead for Odisha.
Sahu said remote parts of southern and western Odisha, including Kalahandi, still have households without access to electricity. He highlighted three dimensions of energy poverty: accessibility, reliability and affordability. “While some communities have no access at all, others have electricity but face prolonged outages. High electricity costs can also make power unaffordable,” Sahu, speaking at a renewable energy workshop organised by the Earth Journalism Network in July in Odisha, told DTE.
For households that rely on solar home systems, however, access does not end with installation. “The easiest task was to deploy the solar system. But the toughest task was to maintain it throughout the period,” Sahu said.
Recalling discussions with the Odisha Renewable Energy Development Agency around 2021-22, Sahu said almost 33,000 solar based infrastructures were non-functional. He attributed this partly to insufficient attention to after-sales services and original equipment manufacturers after installation.
For household DRE systems, Sahu said regular monitoring, user training and access to local repair services were necessary to keep systems functional. In one mechanism, users were contacted 15 days after installation and subsequently at the third, sixth, ninth and 12th months, with monitoring continuing for two years. Users were also provided toll free and local supplier numbers to report problems and access repair and maintenance services.
He also pointed out financing as a barrier to household adoption of DRE technologies, saying banks often struggled to assess the technologies and their ability to generate income for borrowers to repay loans. Banker sensitisation, financing linkages and government backed loans could help improve access to finance, he said.
For Nunaresh, neither the original household DRE systems nor the subsequent government supplied systems have provided lasting electricity access.
“Electricity in our village has become a dream. Despite knocking on government doors, no support has come through. Each time we visited the BDO office, we were shooed away. One time we were even told that it was not possible to extend wires to our village because Thuamul Rampur doesn’t have electricity. What else could we do beyond this?” asked Jugal, with a sense of resignation. “We continue to live the way we used to before the short-lived DRE was deployed.”
For now, villagers rely on a few emergency lights with replaceable batteries and power banks. To recharge the power banks, they travel about 3 km to Khakesh, a nearby village that is also not connected to the grid but has functioning DRE systems. When the power bank runs out after a day or two, they make the trip again.
During community festivals, the village rents a diesel generator for a few days at a cost of Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000, shared among the households.
The experience exposes a central limitation in measuring electrification through infrastructure coverage alone. For communities such as Nunaresh, having a solar panel or an electricity connection is not the same as having dependable electricity. Energy access also depends on whether the system works, whether repairs are affordable and accessible, and whether a community can sustain the cost of keeping it operational, according to Sahu.