The Energy Justice Lens

⚠ Rural and low-income households absorb ~80% of India’s outage burden — so Tier-1 cities stay powered 24/7.

⚠ The Bombay High Court quashed MERC’s solar tariff order in 2025 for bypassing due process.

But India already has the framework to fix this.

Energy Justice. Four pillars. One verdict.

Four Pillars That Must Govern India’s Grid

“Grid stability is the invisible social contract of a modern democracy.” When a frequency deviation forces a load-shedding decision, that decision is moral as well as technical. India needs a framework. Energy Justice provides one.

WHY FRAME THE GRID THROUGH JUSTICE?

Why frame the grid through justice?

India’s power sector has long been evaluated through three lenses: capacity, cost, and reliability. As of 2026, that triad is no longer sufficient. With the country at 50% non-fossil installed capacity — five years ahead of its 2030 target — and chasing 500 GW by decade-end, the grid has become a redistributive instrument. Every dispatch instruction, tariff order, and load-shedding decision now allocates a public good. It quietly allocates burdens too.

Academic and policy work on Energy Justice gives us a clean way to evaluate those allocations. It rests on four pillars — Distributive, Procedural, Recognition, and Restorative. Borrowing them does not replace technical grid management. It disciplines it.

01 · DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

1. Distributive Justice — who bears the burden of an unstable grid?

In India the answer has historically been: not the people who can afford to escape it. When load shedding is required to prevent a wider collapse, the axe has fallen on rural and low-income urban areas. By some estimates these regions have absorbed roughly 80% of historical outage burden so that Tier-1 “smart cities” stay 24/7.

This is not a description of malice. It is a description of the revenue logic that DISCOMs operate under. Cutting an industrial feeder loses paying load; cutting a rural feeder protects revenue. The result is that energy insecurity tracks income — the same households that can least afford a spoiled refrigerator or a missed work shift carry the largest share of grid stress.

[DATA] State-wise distributive-burden statistics

FY25 AT&C-loss figures (CEA / PIB): national average has compressed into the 15% range under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS) target of 12–15% by FY25, but several states remain north of 25%, with the worst outliers above 35%.
Punjab is the cleanest illustrative case: AT&C losses slipped from 20.32% to 19.21% in FY25, with the regulator citing ‘temporary dips in collection efficiency, delays in government subsidy payments, and seasonal agricultural consumption.’
On the supply-hour axis, urban supply improved from 22.1 hrs (FY14) to 23.4 hrs (FY24); the rural–urban hour gap is the lever where distributive harm shows up.
Source: PIB AT&C series; EPR Magazine; The Core — DISCOM state-level leakage.

02 · PROCEDURAL JUSTICE

2. Procedural Justice — are the affected in the room?

The second pillar asks whether the people most affected by grid decisions are present when those decisions are made. Tariff hikes, transmission corridors, large solar parks, and feeder rationalisation orders all reshape someone’s life. Procedural justice asks the simplest question: were they consulted, or merely notified?\ In India this question has institutional teeth. State Electricity Regulatory Commissions hold public hearings before tariff orders; environmental clearances mandate public consultations. The question is whether those processes are substantive or ceremonial.

[CASE] Procedural-justice anchor — Bombay High Court, 2025

Bombay High Court, 2025: quashed the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission’s ex-parte solar tariff review order (issued June 2025) for breaching natural justice and the public-hearing mandate.
The MERC order had restricted banking of solar power to the 9 a.m.–5 p.m. window and added more than ₹55,000 crore in capital-expenditure allowances — all without consultation with affected solar developers and consumers.
The court held that MERC had ‘acted in breach of the principles of natural justice.’
This is a near-perfect procedural-justice case for Indian conditions: affected stakeholders were bypassed, the court restored due process, and the regulator’s authority was recalibrated.
Sources: Courtbook — Bombay HC quashes MERC ex-parte review; Nagpur Today — MERC hearing protest, Feb 2026.

03 · RECOGNITION JUSTICE

3. Recognition Justice — the grid does not face a single “consumer”

The third pillar asks whether the grid recognises that “the consumer” is not one archetype. A small-scale farmer running an irrigation pump, a household with a member on home dialysis, a kirana shop with one ceiling fan — each has a different relationship to electricity and a different cost when it fails.

Recognition justice insists that the grid acknowledge these differences in how it treats interruptions, designs tariffs, and prioritises restoration. Biswas et al. (2022) document this clearly for the Indian context: aggregate reliability statistics hide the asymmetric harm that outages inflict on dependents of home medical equipment and on agricultural communities timed to monsoon cycles.

The PM-KUSUM scheme — solarising agricultural pumps and offering them as feed-in capacity — is one of the few Indian policy instruments that begins to recognise farmers as a distinct class with distinct needs rather than as undifferentiated “low-tariff load”.

04 · RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

4. Restorative Justice — what does the state owe when the grid fails?

When a major blackout closes a hospital theatre, spoils a cold-chain shipment, or shutters a small business for a day, who compensates the harm? In India, the answer is largely: no one.

Compensation regimes exist for property damage from cyclones and floods but not for energy policy failures. Speetles et al. (2023) argue that restorative justice should be designed into grid governance itself — through service-level agreements with consumer-side recourse, mandatory disclosure of outage causes, and a structured liability framework when systemic mismanagement is identified.

[CASE] Restorative-justice precedent — DERC Supply Code, Third Amendment

The DERC Supply Code, Third Amendment (DERC 2021–22) is the cleanest existing example of structurally-mandated restorative compensation in Indian electricity law.
It requires auto-paid compensation for unscheduled outages — ₹50/hour for the first two hours, ₹100/hour thereafter — credited automatically to the consumer’s bill.
If a consumer’s claim is upheld by the Consumer Grievance Redressal Forum (CGRF) or the Electricity Ombudsman, the compensation enhances to ₹5,000 or 5× the original entitlement.
The restorative principle is therefore present in Indian electricity law; what is uneven is its invocation.
Source: India.com — DERC Supply Code Third Amendment; Outlook India — Delhi compensation enhancement.

05 · THE CONSTITUTIONAL SPINE

Behind the four pillars: stability as a fundamental right

Sitting behind the framework is a larger claim: electricity access in 2026 is no longer a privilege but a precondition for dignity. South Asian Studies frames it as a basic human right — the foundation on which education, healthcare, livelihood, and safety actually function.

[LAW] Article 21 dicta extending to essential infrastructure

Three Supreme Court / High Court anchors form a sequential chain.
Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1986 AIR 180) established that the Article 21 right to life is not ‘mere animal existence’ and includes the right to livelihood.
Chameli Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh extended this to the Right to Shelter, with the Supreme Court expressly including electricity within that ambit.
The Allahabad High Court has more recently held that access to electricity is itself a fundamental right under Article 21, directing state authorities to process applications for domestic power connections; in Real Anchors Projects LLP v. NCT of Delhi, the Court held that a legal occupant cannot be denied electricity even if there are ongoing ownership disputes.
The Article 21 architecture for treating reliable electricity as a constitutional right therefore exists; the application is uneven.
Sources: Drishti Judiciary (Olga Tellis); The Law Communicants (Allahabad HC); RMLNLU Law Review.

Treating grid stability as a fundamental right does not mean every consumer gets unlimited power. It means the state cannot treat reliability as a luxury good — to be supplied where the revenue justifies it and withheld where it does not.

06 · THE VERDICT

The verdict

The four pillars of Energy Justice do not change the physics of frequency or the economics of dispatch. They change what we count as success. A grid that meets its 500 GW capacity target but stays unjust in how it distributes burdens, decisions, recognition, and remedies will remain politically fragile and morally indefensible.

The question for every operator, regulator, and policy designer in 2026: which of the four pillars is your institution weakest on — and what would it take to strengthen it?

COMING UP IN PART 3

Part 3 — The Ethics of Load Shedding — examines who stays in the dark when the grid is under stress. We introduce the Grid Gini Coefficient: a measurable proxy for whether load-shedding decisions are made on equity or on revenue. The DISCOMs already have the data. The question is whether they choose to look.

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