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On paper, electrified villages - in reality, darkness

Zafar Bhat. Dated: 7/21/2018 11:11:36 AM

Zafar Bhat
Jammu, July 20
Categorically, in J&K, there are various villages that the government claims to have “electrified” in the last year, under the Modi government’s flagship scheme of rural electrification, Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana. However, according to the government’s own field engineers, there is no electrical infrastructure in the village.
Whereas, similarly, many tehsils with farflung villages are misclassified
as electrified villages in government books. These are not exceptional cases. The analysis of rural electrification data shows that the number of villages said to be electrified in the last year is exaggerated.
Notably, Central Government Minister had announced that all remaining villages would be electrified within 1,000 days. As of April 1, 2015, according to government numbers, 18,452 Indian villages were still un-electrified. Note that a village is considered electrified if public places in the village and 10 per cent of its households have access to electricity.
Particularly, to make the process transparent, real-time data on villages being electrified has been made available to the public through a mobile app and a Web dashboard called GARV. The platform was launched in October 2015. Alongside, 309 Gram Vidyut Abhiyantas (GVAs) were deployed by the government to monitor the electrification process and enter the data on the GARV application.
However, one major source of discrepancy is regarding those villages where the GVA has noted that the village is un-electrified, yet it is counted as electrified on the app Union Finance Minister in his Budget speech of 2016 said that the number of villages electrified in the last year was more than the combined number in the past three years. This claim may not be true, as it is found that of the 7,000-plus villages said to be electrified last year, 3,604 villages were assigned the status, “Village found electrified during the survey.” This means that these villages were found electrified when GVAs first visited there. The REC official explained, “It is difficult to say when the work was done as the GVA visits started in October 2015.
Pertinently, the count of villages being electrified, ticking upward every day in the GARV application — extensively shared by Union Power Minister on social media and cited by Prime Minister in his speeches — is thus not a guarantee that all villages being claimed as electrified are actually so.