Satellite Data for the Social Sciences: Measuring Rural Electrification with Nighttime Lights

Remote sensing data has the potential to revolutionize social science. One of
the most prominent examples of this is the Nighttime Lights dataset, which
provides digital measures of nighttime luminosity from 1992 to 2013. This
study evaluates the Nighttime Lights data against detailed rural electrification
data from the 2011 Census of India. The results suggest that many nighttime
luminosity measures derived from satellite data are surprisingly accurate for
measuring rural electrification, even at the village level and using simple statistical
tools. We also demonstrate that this accuracy can be substantially improved
by using of better GIS maps, basic geoprocessing tools, and particular
aggregations of nighttime luminosity. Nighttime luminosity performs worse
in measuring financial inclusion or proxies of poverty, however, and detects
rural electrification less accurately when the supply of power is intermittent.
These results offer guidelines for when and how remote sensing data can be
used when administrative data is absent or unreliable.