Electricity propels prosperity

| | in Oped

If India has to progress, villages must be lit up. The Government’s electric push is designed to take darkness out of the lives of thousands of rural people

Bakhari Nazir and Kherimal are two sleepy villages in Bihar's east Champaran district, about 20 kilometres apart from each other. While the first one is closer to the National Highway-28, while one is driving from Patna to Champaran's headquarter Motihari, the latter is tucked deep inside it. What's common between the two villages is darkness and despair. About two years ago, when one of the world's biggest agri-business, multinational corporation Syngenta decided to launch its ambitious corporate social responsibility programme called I-CLEAN (Inculcating Cleanliness Learning, Education, Awareness and New Habits), there was considerable glee among the people. What caused excitement among them were the solar lights that came along with the toilets, vegetable sheds and drinking water facilities under the project. For many, it was the first time they had ever seen light. They were ecstatic.

I was reminded of it on Sunday, when I learnt from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tweet about universal electrification. He announced in his tweet: “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.” This is certainly historic and every Indian should be proud of this feat, achieved after a determined push by the Union Government of its ambitious Rs 75,893 crore Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana. When the scheme was launched, there were 18,452 unelectrified census villages out of India's 597,464 census villages. On August 15, 2015 Prime Minister Modi announced that all such villages would be electrified in 1,000 days.

However, the fact that all villages are connected to the grid does not mean that all Indians have access to electricity. The Government is aware of this and is already working on its next big move of providing electricity connections to over 40 million families by December 2018 under the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana (Saubhagya). According to Saubhagya dashboard on its website, out of over 3.13 lakh targeted households, over 50 lakh households have been electrified and the programme is in full swing.  The scheme funds the cost of last-mile connectivity to willing households and will provide an architecture through which the Government seeks to reduce import of fossil fuels, boost underutilised power plants and meet its climate change commitments. By providing universal access to electricity under the scheme, the Government plans to leverage the same to promote induction cooking, heating and charging electric vehicles, apart from the initial target of providing electricity.

Why the success of DDUGJY and massive push to Saubhagya is a big deal should not require much imagination. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim had once rightly said, “When people don't have access to electricity, their world of possibilities narrows.” He further added in a 2015 post on WeForum.org of World Economic Forum, “When businesses don't have access to electricity, they cannot grow. If we are going to end extreme poverty in the next 15 years, we must greatly expand access to energy for the poorest people and the poorest nations. Universal access to energy — especially clean, affordable energy — will be the only way for us to truly give an equal opportunity for nations to grow and people to reach their full potential in the years ahead.”

In a study, Jörg Peters of the University of Passau and Maximilian Sievert of RWI-Leibniz Institute for Economic Research informs that Rwanda has implemented one of the most comprehensive electrification programmes anywhere in the world. In 2009, only six per cent of Rwandans had access to electricity. The Government's aim is to lift this to 70 per cent by 2018. After their analysis they said, “We found that electrification had wide-ranging effects on the living conditions of households whose daily lives were made easier on a range of fronts…our research confirms the importance of electrification has for the rural poor.”

Modi knows all this very well and his push is designed to take darkness out of the lives of people of Kherimal, Bakhari Nazir and thousands of other villages in India. For he knows that it propels them to prosperity and creates innumerable opportunities. If India has to progress, her villages must be lit up. It's a mere coincidence that on April 10, it is near these two villages in east Champaran that the Prime Minister had joined thousands of Swachhagrahis (ambassadors of cleanliness) to celebrate the success of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan on the occasion of concluding ceremony of Centenary of Champaran Satyagraha in Bihar.

(The writer is a strategic communications professional)