By Florence Au

India is a country of great diversity and contradictions.  In a country of 1.1 billion people, there were 465 million mobile subscribers at the end of September 2009. Yet, in the same period India also had the largest number of people in the world without access to electricity. The per capita electricity consumption rate in India is 480Wh/capita in 2005; lower than the rates of Brazil, Zimbabwe and Mexico, among other developing countries.  In response to this challenge, the Indian government has launched an ambitious new program to provide electricity to 100% of households by 2012.