What Determines Household Multidimensional Energy Poverty? A Study of the Rural Jagatsinghpur District of Odisha

Energy Poverty, a contemporary global challenge, acts as a major hindrance in attaining Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by accelerating carbon emissions, adversely affecting the quality of the environment, gender equality, and people's health and education. To address this problem, although prominent schemes, such as PMUY and PAHAL, have been in operation in India at the national and state levels, as of 2021, around 44 percent of households at the country level and 66 percent in Odisha lack access to clean cooking fuels. Against this backdrop, the present study tries to undertake a household-level analysis of multidimensional energy poverty in Odisha's second topmost multidimensionally non-poor district, i.e., Jagatsinghpur, which is the novelty of this study. The Alkire Foster Methodology has been adopted to construct the Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index (MEPI), considering five dimensions and five indicators. Binomial logistic regression has been used to study the impact of different socioeconomic and demographic factors on household energy poverty level. The study's major finding reveals that about 69 percent of the study households are multidimensionally energy-poor. The study also observed negative impact of the educational level of the head of household and income level of the household and positive impact of household size on household multidimensional energy poverty. The existence of regional disparities in multidimensional energy poverty among all the blocks in the district is another finding of this study. Suitable policy interventions and support mechanisms are, therefore, desired to address multidimensional energy poverty and foster sustainable development.