Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday announced the country has reached the 100 per cent rural electrification target after leisang, a remote village in Manipur, became the last village of India to get electricity connection. According to Government officials, all 597,464 villages in India, as per the Census, have been electrified 12 days ahead of the deadline set by the Prime Minister.
The news of total rural electrification comes in the backdrop of Modi’s mega announcement during his Independence Day speech of 2015 when he promised that all villages where electricity was yet to reach, will have power within 1,000 days. later, the Government announced a new scheme called Deendayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana to create basic power infrastructure and connectivity.
PM Modi on Sunday lauded the efforts by the Ministry of Power in a series of tweets while terming the achievement as historic. “leisang village in Manipur, like the thousands of other villages across India, has been powered and empowered! This news will make every Indian proud and delighted,” Modi tweeted.
“The 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 added.
“I salute the efforts of all those who worked tirelessly on the ground, including the team of officials, the technical staff and all others, to make this dream of a #PowerfulIndia a reality. Their efforts today will help generations of Indians in the coming years,” he further said.
A village is considered electrified if it has basic electrical infrastructure such as distribution transformer and distribution lines in the inhabited locality and at least 10 per cent of its households and all public places — including schools, panchayat office and health centre, dispensaries, community centres, — have electricity.
With electricity reaching every village, the real challenge for the Government now is to ensure power supply to every household which remains a daunting task. In a bid to provide electricity to every household the Government had announced a new scheme -- the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana or Saubhagya Scheme.