Mapping Energy Justice: How GIS Can Help Understand Rural Electricity Challenges in India
Introduction
My name is Shrishti Sharma, and I am a PhD student in Geospatial Information Systems at Claremont Graduate University and a Technical Writer at Anytrek, California. I’ve always believed that the most meaningful research begins with a simple question born from real life. For me, that question is: why are some communities still struggling with something as fundamental as reliable electricity?
In this post, I’d like to share the story behind that question, how my own experiences growing up in India sparked my interest in energy justice, and why I believe GIS has the power to uncover patterns, guide smarter decisions, and help create more equitable infrastructure for communities that have long been overlooked.
Growing up in a small city Raipur, in the state of Chhattisgarh, India, power outages were simply part of everyday life. And it still is for some parts of the society.
During the hot summer months, electricity would disappear for hours and sometimes even for an entire night. My family would carry pillows and bedsheets to the rooftop, hoping a cool breeze would make sleeping possible for us kids. More often than not, the night ended with mosquito bites, interrupted sleep, and another morning wondering when the electricity would return.
At the time, I assumed this was normal.
As I grew older and pursued higher education in big cities, and when I came to the United States, I began to realize that reliable electricity is something many people rarely think about. For them, it is not recognized as an issue. Yet for millions of families across rural India, dependable access to electricity remains uncertain.
During my most recent trip to India last year, I visited my granny's hometown. I was surprised to find that many of the same challenges still existed. Honestly, since we do not use power generators or inverters, my house had power cuts almost every day for a few minutes to hours. Long power cuts, unreliable service, and frequent disruptions continued to affect daily life. It made me ask a simple question:
Why are some communities still experiencing these challenges, and how can GIS help us better understand them?
Looking Beyond the Power Outage
Power cuts are often viewed as isolated technical failures, but they are usually symptoms of larger, interconnected challenges.
Some communities may have aging electrical infrastructure.
Others may be located far from substations or distribution networks.
Extreme weather, growing electricity demand, difficult terrain, and limited investment can all contribute to unreliable service.
The result is more than inconvenience.
Electricity affects nearly every aspect of daily life:
- Students studying for examinations
- Farmers relying on irrigation systems
- Small businesses serving their communities
- Health clinics storing vaccines and medicines
- Families simply trying to sleep through a hot summer night
Reliable electricity is not just an engineering issue—it is an issue of equity.
This is where the concept of Energy Justice becomes important.
What Is Energy Justice?
Energy justice asks whether everyone has fair access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy.
It recognizes that where a person lives should not determine whether they can study after sunset, keep medicine refrigerated, or operate a small business.
Unfortunately, these disparities often have a geographic pattern.
And geography is exactly where GIS excels.
Why GIS Matters
As I began studying GIS and creating maps using ArcGIS Online, I realized that maps could answer questions that traditional reports often cannot.
Instead of asking only:
"Where are power outages happening?"
GIS allows us to ask much deeper questions:
- Which villages experience the most frequent outages?
- Are these communities located farther from substations?
- Do outage patterns overlap with lower-income populations?
- How do floods, extreme heat, or difficult terrain affect electricity reliability?
- Which schools and healthcare facilities are most vulnerable to prolonged outages?
- Where should infrastructure investments be prioritized first?
These are spatial questions. To answer these questions, I would combine electricity supply data, administrative boundaries, electrical infrastructure, population and environmental datasets in ArcGIS online and ArcGIS Pro. By overlaying these layers, I could begin identifying geographic relationships that aren’t obvious in spreadsheets alone. For example, areas with low electricity supply could be compared with terrain, flood risks, or distance from substations to better understand what factors may contribute to persistent service challenges.
The workflow in Figure 1 illustrates how GIS transforms raw data into meaningful insights. Rather than analyzing each dataset in isolation, ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro make it possible to integrate multiple layers of geographic information and examine how they interact. Spatial analysis tools such as Overlay analysis, Hot Spot analysis, and Network Analysis can then reveal patterns, identify underserved communities, and highlight areas where infrastructure investments may have the greatest impact.
A GIS-Based Approach
Following this workflow, the first step would be to bring together datasets such as:
- Electrical substations
- Transmission and distribution networks
- Village boundaries
- Population density
- Schools and hospitals
- Elevation and terrain
- Flood and heat-risk maps
- Satellite imagery
- Historical outage records
- Renewable energy potential
Instead of viewing each dataset independently, GIS allows us to visualize how they interact.
Using ArcGIS Pro, I could apply Hot Spot analysis to identify statistically significant clusters of recurring electricity supply challenges. This would help distinguish isolated cases from regions experiencing persistent reliability issues that may warrant further investigation.
ArcGIS Network Analysis could help evaluate how proximity to substations or transmission infrastructure influences electricity reliability.
Suitability modeling could identify locations where decentralized solar microgrids or other renewable energy solutions may provide the greatest benefit.
The results could be shared through ArcGIS Dashboards, allowing policymakers and utility providers to explore outage patterns interactively and prioritize infrastructure investments.
The goal is not simply to create maps.
The goal is to create better decisions.
To explore these questions, I created the map below using ArcGIS Online and publicly available data from Ministry of Power, Government of India. By visualizing average daily rural electricity supply across India’s states and union territories, the map reveals geographic patterns that are much harder to recognize in a spreadsheet alone.
At first glance, the map reveals that rural electricity supply is not evenly distributed across India. State shaded in green represent the highest average daily electricity supply, while blue indicates relatively high service levels. Yellow and orange highlight states with moderate to low electricity availability, and red identifies regions with the lowest average daily supply. Rather than viewing these values in a spreadsheet, ArcGIS Online makes these geographic patterns immediately visible, helping reveal where disparities exist and prompting further questions about the infrastructure, environmental, and socioeconomic factors that may contribute to them. While this map does not explain why these differences occur, it demonstrates how spatial visualization can transform data into insights that guide deeper analysis.
From Personal Experience to Research
The nights I spent sleeping on rooftops because there was no electricity are among my earliest memories.
Years later, those memories have become one of the motivations behind my research interests.
As a Ph.D. student in GIS, my research focuses on how geospatial technologies can support more equitable and resilient energy infrastructure planning in rural India. My dissertation will examine how geospatial analysis and ArcGIS technologies can be used to identify and help uncover the spatial patterns behind electricity reliability challenges in rural India and inform data-driven decisions for future infrastructure investments. While my research in centered on India, I hope the methods and insights will also be applicable to communities across the world facing similar challenges.
GIS cannot generate electricity or replace aging infrastructure. But by using tools such as ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, and ArcGIS Dashboards, it can reveal spatial patterns, identify underserved communities, and support evidence-based decisions that improve people’s lives.
It cannot replace aging transformers or build new transmission lines.
But it can help us understand where the greatest needs exist, reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden, and support decisions that improve people's lives.
For me, this is one of the most exciting aspects of GIS.
It transforms personal experiences into opportunities for meaningful research and real-world impact.
Perhaps the next generation of children growing up in rural communities won't remember sleeping on rooftops because the power went out.
Perhaps they'll simply remember having the lights on.