The paper assesses the demand for rural electricity services and contrasts it with the technology options available for rural electrification. Decentralised Distributed Generation can be economically viable as reflected by case studies reported in literature and analysed in our field study. Project success is driven by economically viable technology choice; however it is largely contingent on organisational leadership and appropriate institutional structures. While individual leadership can compensate for deployment barriers, we argue that a large scale roll out of rural electrification requires an alignment of economic incentives and institutional structures to implement, operate and maintain the scheme. This is demonstrated with the help of seven case studies of projects across north India.