India’s PM Narendra Modi Gives Power To All 19,000 Unelectrified Villages
The Narendra Modi government has lit up all inhabited villages, crossing the last milestone towards universal electricity access and raising the bar for the opposition ahead of next year’s general elections.
At 5.30pm on Saturday, Manipur’s Leisang village became the last of the non-electrified villages to join the country’s mainline supply network.
The last inhabited village to be powered through off-grid system — isolated supply networks, mostly with solar power plants — was Pakol, also in Manipur.
This means all of the country’s 597,464 inhabited villages have now access to power, fulfilling a promise the PM had made on August 15, 2015.
In his first speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Mr Modi had on August 15, 2014, announced that all the 18,000 unelectrified villages in the country will get power over the next 1000 days.
Having fulfilled that promise, the PM took to Twitter in a big way. “28th April 2018 will be remembered as a historic day in the development journey of India. Yesterday, we fulfilled a commitment due to which the lives of several Indians will be transformed forever! I am delighted that every single village of India now has access to electricity,” he said through a series of tweets.
While the mission of electrifying all villages has been accomplished, the real challenge now is to feed that power to each household in those villages, a task being undertaken through the Saubhagya scheme.
At the time of Mr Modi’s 2015 announcement, census data showed 18,452 villages as powerless.
When the work on village electrification started, another 1275 villages were found without access to electricity.
Some 1236 villages are uninhabited and 35 that were notified as grazing reserves.
The seeds of 100 per cent village electrification was sowed with the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana, a scheme with a projected outlay of Rs 76,000 crore, that Mr Modi had launched on July 25, 2015.
This scheme drew from Modi’s successful experiment as Gujarat chief minister to separate farm and household feeders in rural areas to ensure 24X7 power to households and assured supply to farmers.
One of the key objectives of the DDGJUY was to achieve 100 per cent village electrification.
It also envisaged separating feeders, strengthening distribution network, metering at all levels and setting up micro grid and off-grid distribution networks.