Economy
Mapping India's Electricity Deserts
A project uses satellite imagery to show how access to power has improved in villages across the country.
Cow dung and Kerosene lamps. That’s how many of the 200 million-plus Indians who live without electricity generate light and heat in their homes. The number of such households has decreased during the last 20 years, but large swathes of rural land in the country remain stuck in darkness, a mapping project by the University of Michigan and the World Bank shows. Here are the creators in a blog post accompanying the project:
Researchers used data from satellite images of the country taken every night from 1993 to 2013 to visualize the light emitted by 600,000 villages in India. Each yellow spot on the map shows how much light a particular village was giving out at a point on the timeline.