Govt Claims Every Indian Village Has Electricity; 32 Million Households Still Grapple In The Dark

After over 70 years of Independence, India has managed to reach an important milestone of electrifying around 59 lakh inhabited villages. The task was accomplished on April 28 when Manipur’s Leisang village became the last village to join India’s mainline power supply network. The mission of achieving 100 per cent village electrification was launched in July 2015, and has been fulfilled in less than three years against the target of 1,000 days.

According to the official data, till mid-October 2017, around 82 per cent of the total households were electrified. While Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh has 100 per cent coverage, Uttar Pradesh had 55 per cent and Jharkhand had 48 per cent coverage by then. It is worth mentioning that India is the world’s second most populated nation with most people lacking access to electricity. However, the pace of electrifying villages has been slowest in last three years. Between 2005-2014, around 12,000 villages were electrified per year but since 2015, only 4,842 villages have been electrified per year.

 Looking ahead

Though the village electrification target is nearly met, it will still keep almost 32 million households in dark as the government deems a village electrified if 10 per cent of its household, as well as the public places, are connected with the main supply line.

Of the 170 million households, around 82 per cent of them are electrified. Metered households constitute 50 per cent of the total. Further, only 85 million rural households in India are metered. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, 50 per cent of the households are metered. In Rajasthan and Uttarakhand, it is zero. 

Also, connecting all households will require 28 gigawatts of generation capacity, the power ministry estimated. But under-utilised capacity, fuel shortages and overdue payments from distribution companies have put nearly 75 gigawatts of power projects under financial stress, according to Association of Power Producers. Apart from this, the quality of the supply is also questionable as the loss-making state distribution companies often cut supplies to reduce losses. In the year 2017-18, the northern region had a peak shortfall of 2301MW, of which Uttar Pradesh alone accounted for 2213 MW or 10 per cent of the state’s peak demand.  

Nevertheless, the government has planned to invest $2.5 billion to provide power connections to nearly every household by the end of March 2019.  The Modi government launched the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana (Saubhagya) scheme last September to improve electrification coverage in rural areas as a move towards fulfilling its promise of 24-hour power supply to all households. Currently, only six states have round the clock power supply.