Historically Bihar has always been a power deficit State and this has badly affected its development and industrialisation through small and medium scale industries. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who in August 2014 had taken a pledge not to seek votes if he failed to improve the power situation, made it a point to work for the electrification of Bihar. He included this scheme in his seven resolves
His seventh but most important resolve, power connection to all houses, was fulfilled on Tuesday. Under this scheme each house in rural areas will be provided power connection, but those who already have connection would have to pay the power bills. Nitish said six resolves of his Government had already been implemented and now the seventh resolve has been launched.
A fresh survey was conducted to identify the houses without power connection and power companies were engaged in the necessary infrastructure for providing uninterrupted power which is linked to rural electrification programme.
“We have worked hard in this sector and the transmission evacuation capacity increased from 1,000 MW to 6,772 MW and peak demand inflated from 700MW to 3,769MW. Earlier the number of power consumers was 17.31 lakh which is now 81 lakh,” said Nitish.
A few months back PM had lauded the efforts of Bihar in speedy expansion of rural electrification.
Principal secretary of energy department and the man behind the turnaround of the power scenario in Bihar Pratyaya Amrit said that through hard work ethics
and standard the department has been able to create an identity and confidence in the public. He said power
availability is expected to further increase by over 200MW once the two units of 110MW at Barauni Power Station become functional.