of the India Human Development Survey. Both sources are known to miss the top of the income distributions and report electricity consumption based on self-reported figures. These surveys are not designed to accurately measure residential electricity consumption and therefore do not capture the full distribution of electricity consumed in a region. Figure 5 compares the consumption distribution from the administrative billing data from one of Rajasthan’s power utilities from 2015-16 to NSSO’s consumption expenditure survey of 2011-12 for districts served by this utility. The figure highlights the fact that, assuming distribution neutrality between these sets of years, NSSO consumption data is particularly imprecise in capturing the top ends of the consumption distribution and therefore unsuitable to conduct counterfactual pricing analysis.

This paper uses appliance level ownership from a household survey and household’s billing cycle-level electricity consumption from administrative billing data to estimate a demand model for energy services. Consumption-specific charges under the IBT schedule and variation in weather conditions within a household’s billing cycle are accounted for in the estimation of this model. The model also incorporates heterogeneity in residential demand due to observable socio-economic characteristics-–such as, income, family sizes and other observable factors that differ across customers. This allows us to recover the price-responsiveness of demand into four categories of energy services demand as well as the overall responsiveness of electricity demand to the price of electricity.

# **SECTION III: Data and Descriptive Background**

The data used in this paper are from three different sources: (i) administrative data on billing cycle-level electricity consumption and bills issued for every household in two districts of Rajasthan – Jaipur and Alwar and served by a local electricity utility called JVVNL<sup>10</sup> for four years.

(ii) detailed household demographic characteristics and appliance ownership and use from a survey designed and implemented in 2017; and, (iii) spatially disaggregated daily temperature and precipitation data from Indian Meteorological Department.

Each of these data sources is described below with additional details offered in Appendix 2.

# _2.1 Electricity consumption and prices data_

Administrative cycle-level billing data for residential consumers were collected directly from JVVNL. The data set contains a unique billing code identifier which is used to match households across survey and administrative data sets. The administrative data provides information on the total energy consumed during the billing cycle, the calendar dates on which the meter was read, the total energy charges and fixed charges, electricity duties, subsidies, and other charges included in the bill. However, it does not record the tier of the IBT schedule corresponding to the monthly consumption and the corresponding marginal price of electricity. These are backed out by calculating the energy price implicit

> 10 JVVNL is one of the three electricity distribution companies in Rajasthan. JVVNL serves approximately 40 percent of total demand for power in Rajasthan. The entire state of Rajasthan is divided into three distinct service areas which are served by each utility. As geographic areas are demarcated across utilities, there is no retail competition across utilities.

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