rounds form a panel of 6,008 households across 242 villages in 15 states; a village-level survey also accompanied the household survey in both rounds, which included wage rates by activity for men and women. The REDS was designed to be representative of rural India, excluding states in significant conflict.<sup>17</sup> For both rounds, the survey collected data on education, health, marital status, labor supply (main and secondary occupations) and sources of farm and non-farm income, access to infrastructure and facilities, consumption expenditure and assets, agricultural production, and land owned and inherited.<sup>18</sup> Village surveys across both rounds elicited community access to facilities, infrastructure, prices, as well as population characteristics.

For each round, we construct a binary indicator of whether the household has electricity for household use. Only the 1999 survey directly asked whether the household had electricity in the home. In the earlier survey, households were asked about their ownership of consumer durables that use electricity. We construct an indicator of household electricity over time that is equal to one in 1982 if the household reports having an electric appliance, and equal to one in 1999 if the household said they had an electricity connection in the home or if it incurred consumption expenditures on electricity.<sup>19</sup> In a few cases, it is unclear whether an appliance requires electricity to run. For example, early radios and sewing machines were run without electricity. The evidence for rural India in 1982 leads us to believe that such appliances were typically not electricity driven then. We constructed alternative definitions of household more recent round for 2006 which is not yet for public access. However, for the questions of interest to us, the 19821999 panel covers the key period.

17 The 1982 round excluded Assam because of an insurgency at the time. It surveyed a total of 4,979 households across 250 villages. The 1999 round excluded Jammu and Kashmir due to unrest there. It covered all surviving 1982 households and added a small random sample of new households from the same villages. Together with household division since 1982, this results in a sample of 7,474 households. The increase in the number of households with baseline information in 1982 and hence in the 1982-1999 panel is explained by household splits over time. Current representativeness of the survey data for rural India can be questioned and we can only make inferences for the baseline panel sample at subsequent dates.

18 Both survey rounds also collected data from women on their time allocation and that of their children. This is likely to be quite noisy data, especially in measuring changes over time (not helped by changes in the questionnaire for reporting time allocation). We decided that the data were not usable for our purpose.

19 Note that expenditures on electricity for production are reported in a different survey module. In the 1999 round, 366 households (out of the sample of over 6,000) incur electricity expenditures but don’t report having electricity. The vast majority (322 households) own at least one electric appliance. We therefore define these 366 households as being electrified in 1999. There are 74 households for which our electricity indicator is positive in 1982 and zero in 1999. Of these, 21 split off from a mother household that maintains its electricity status over time; 31 split off from an initial household with electricity to a number of households of which none have electricity in 1999. The remaining 22 households did not split between rounds and we can only conclude that they became un-electrified over the period studied, perhaps through loss of a private generator or an illegal connection.

16