hen night falls over rural Sindh, darkness is not a poetic abstraction. It is a practical condition that reaches into education, work, health and mobility. In households without reliable electricity, children cut short their homework, mothers cook in dim light and mobile phones become rationed objects because charging them may require a long trip. The problem is not a mere inconvenience. It is a persistent structure of deprivation in which the absence of power limits the circulation of information, income and dignity. The International Energy Agency says 655 million people still lacked electricity in 2024 as global access stagnated at 92 per cent. It notes that 2 billion people lack clean cooking, reminding us that energy poverty is still one of the defining development failures of our time.

Pakistan’s rural energy gap has a particularly sharp Sindh dimension. Provincial officials told the Provincial Assembly in 2023 that 54 per cent of the province’s villages lacked electricity. A Sindh SDG-7 document summarising NEPRA’s 2021 report said that around 31,000 villages across Pakistan remained unelectrified, about 9,200 of them within the Sindh DISCO areas of SEPCO, HESCO and K-Electric. That is not a marginal deficit; it is a map of structural exclusion. This helps explain why energy debates in Sindh often sound like arguments about rights rather than supply. The issue is not only how much electricity is generated, but also who can use it and under what conditions.

Sindh is simultaneously a major generator of renewable power and a province where many rural communities still remain under-electrified. The Jhimpir corridor alone now hosts 36 wind power producers with a combined capacity of 1,845 megawatts. This does not automatically translate into local access. This is the central flaw of a centralised grid logic: generation is counted nationally; deprivation is experienced locally. In energy planning, that distinction matters. A province can be productive energy-wise and socially under-served at the same time.

That tension has been partly addressed by Sindh’s attempt to build a provincial regulatory framework. In 2023, the Sindh Regulation of Electric Power Services Act established the Sindh Electric Power Regulatory Authority and declared that the province should have a more effective role in the supply, distribution and regulation of electricity within its borders. The language of the law is important because it signals an institutional shift: electricity is no longer being treated as a federal engineering problem, but as a provincial governance question. In a country where energy policy has often been centralised and politically fragmented, that is no small change.

Against this backdrop, the Sindh Solar Home Systems programme deserves attention as a policy experiment. It was reported in April 2026 that Phase II of the project would distribute 275,000 solar energy systems across rural Sindh, with beneficiaries identified through the BISP database and the work executed by the Sindh Rural Support Organisation in partnership with the NRTC. The appeal of such a model is clear. If the grid cannot reliably reach dispersed settlements, energy can be delivered directly to households. Here is recognition that universal access does not always arrive through the same infrastructure that served cities.

The IEA says that in rural areas, where over 80 percent of electricity-deprived people live, mini-grids and stand-alone systems, mostly solar-based, are often the most viable solutions. Its analysis also stresses that distributed renewable solutions are cost-effective for electricity access. IEA experts argue that clean-energy transitions must prioritise universal access and the eradication of energy poverty. The metric that matters is not how impressive the power sector looks on paper, but whether households can actually light a room, cool a space and keep a phone alive.

A province can be productive energy-wise and socially under-served at the same time.

The World Bank’s Pakistan research on electrification found that grid access has significant positive effects on household cash income, expenditure and educational outcomes. Similar evidence from Bangladesh is even more instructive: the World Bank says the country’s Solar Home Systems programme installed over 4 million systems between 2003 and 2018, reaching 16 percent of rural households by 2016 and contributing significantly to near-universal electricity access. The lesson is that access to electricity alters household economic and social possibilities in measurable ways.

This is why experts often describe electrification as enabling infrastructure. It enlarges the working day, improves the conditions under which children study, makes household enterprise more feasible and reduces dependence on costly and dirty fuels. According to the IEA, access to modern energy improves health, expands economic opportunity, strengthens security and builds more resilient communities. Valerie Levkov of the World Bank Group has made a similar point in the context of the global energy-access report, arguing that energy access brings jobs, development and macroeconomic resilience.

A serious assessment must keep its balance. Solar home systems can solve basic domestic needs, but they cannot substitute for a functioning grid in every respect. They do not power irrigation at scale, they cannot replace industrial electricity demand and they cannot compensate for transmission losses or weak distribution networks. Nor can technology by itself overcome administrative failure. Affordability remains a barrier even where infrastructure exists. The IEA warns that targeted subsidies, innovative financing and strong coordination will be essential if countries are to avoid leaving the poorest households behind.

There is also a political dimension. In Pakistan, energy has long been discussed in terms of megawatts, tariffs and deficits. For rural communities it is experienced as a question of recognition. A village beside a wind corridor that still lacks reliable power is not just a technical anomaly; it is evidence of a planning model that has not learnt to align generation with local welfare.

If the programme is implemented transparently, maintained properly and expanded with institutional discipline, it may become one of the province’s more consequential public interventions. Its real significance will lie in a child reading after sunset, a family sleeping through a heatwave with a fan running, a farmer charging a phone at home and a woman no longer arranging her evening around the availability of a borrowed socket.

The writer is a researcher and development practitioner working with donor organisations. He can be contacted at Naimatullah @iba-suk.edu.pk