Citizens at the Center: Analysing Citizen Engagement by Electricity Regulators with a focus on Grievance Redressal at sub-national level in India

Given the high techno-commercial complexity of electricity, securing effective participation of citizens is a challenge, especially in the context of developing countries such as India. However, engaging citizens at each step of the policy process is important, as the cost of policy decisions, such as those concerning resource adequacy, capacity assessment, etc. is borne by the citizens as consumers of an essential public utility. Through this research, we develop a framework to analyse the “citizen-centredness” of electricity regulation, with a focus on grievance redressal mechanisms on a sub-national level in India. While existing frameworks take a multi-stakeholder perspective to measuring governance quality, we focus only on the perspective of citizens and assess the engagement of citizen-stakeholders in the last-mile service delivery through sub-national grievance redressal systems in India. The present framework to measure, de jure, the citizen-centredness of grievance redressal mechanisms based on existing literature, comprising 4 key indicators, 11 sub-indicators, and 74 measurement attributes. We apply the citizen-centredness framework to analyse a random sample of 10 Indian states, and find a moderate score of only 0.42 across the sample, with only 3 states performing above average, with variation among States across the key indicators of autonomy, accountability, participation, and transparency. Our findings demonstrate a significant scope of improvement through regulatory reforms at the service delivery level for electricity in India.