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The Guardian

Electricity has reached every Indian village after the establishment of a connection at the weekend to Leisang, a tiny hamlet in the remote state of Manipur, the government has announced.
Opposition parties have been sceptical of the achievement, calling it a political ruse ahead of important state and national elections.
Indian media have also highlighted cases of villages supposedly electrified but where power appears to be non-existent, intermittent or available only to a few.
The Indian government considers a village to be electrified if basic infrastructure such as schools are connected to the grid as well as at least 10 per cent of households.
About 270 million Indians, more than one-sixth of the population, are estimated to live without electricity, according to a World Bank report last year.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted at the weekend that Saturday would be “remembered as a historic day in the development journey of India”.
“We fulfilled a commitment due to which the lives of several Indians will be transformed forever”, he said, announcing every village in the country was “powered and empowered”.

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.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 29, 2018

Efforts to provide electricity to every Indian have historically been hampered by poorly designed and implemented schemes that encouraged contractors to do the bare minimum to make sure a village qualified as electrified.
How India is public shaming people into using toilets
However, Surjit Singh Ningthoujam, who runs computer literacy programmes in the remote district of Manipur, where the last village to receive electricity is located, said progress in the area in the past three years had been impressive.
“When electricity comes, people usually buy a TV and that totally changes their lives,” he said.
“It is also a hilly area, so with lights they can go from house to house at nighttime.”

Still, he said, the supply in many villages remained unreliable and he often had to run his computer training courses using solar energy, which has reached some villages before government power lines.
In Rajghat, a village in Rajasthan, solar panels are all that power the few lights in the community. Dilip Kumar, a resident, greeted Modi’s announcement bitterly.
“I have shifted my brother and children from this village so they can study,” the farmer, 26, said.
The government had refused for years to connect the village to the grid because it is legally considered to be on forest land, he said.
India’s Prime Minister Modi inaugurates world’s second biggest dam – on his own birthday
“And now we have to use mustard oil to light our lamps, since the government banned kerosene because it is too polluting. But mustard oil is too expensive.”
A spokesman for the opposition Congress party, Randeep Singh Surjewala, tweeted that the previous government led by his party had electrified 97 per cent of the country’s nearly 700,000 villages but “did not boast”.
He said Modi had only needed to connect 18,452 villages to declare full electrification.
Modi promised in his independence day speech in 2015 that every Indian village would be electrified within 1,000 days.
Saturday, when Leisang was connected to the grid, was 988 days since that promise.
The government has said all of India’s 180 million rural Indian households will have electricity by 2019.
About 82 per cent have electricity as of Monday, according to its real-time progress tracker.
Additional reporting by The Washington Post


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India

India fully electric after last village gets connected … so the government claims

Every village in India now has electricity, but millions still live in darkness

An India Commercial Services worker installs an electricity pole, part of a transmission line being erected, on the outskirts of Alwar, Rajasthan, India, on Tuesday, April 17, 2018. Rural electrification is a cornerstone of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's plan to improve the lives of Indians, a plan which included connecting more than 18,000 villages by the end of this month. With only a few left to be electrified, according to government data, that's a target Modi's administration looks set to meet. But that will still keep almost 32 million homes in the dark: the government deems a village “electrified” if 10 percent of its households, as well as public places such as schools and health centers, are connected. Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg

A billboard, featuring an image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, advertises the Indian government's Saubhagya Scheme, a project to provide electricity to all households. Photo: Bloomberg

How India is public shaming people into using toilets

A woman brushes the ground near new toilet in Katra village in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh. Photo: EPA

TO GO WITH India-sanitation-social-toilet-Gandhi,FOCUS BY ABHAYA SRIVASTAVA In this photograph taken on September 22, 2014, Indian schoolchildren talk in front of a poster bearing a quote from Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a school run by sanitation charity Sulabh International in New Delhi. Surrounded by latrines and soap dispensers, charity founder Bindeshwar Pathak is most at home in the toilet, one of which he vows to build in every impoverished home in India. AFP PHOTO/SAJJAD HUSSAIN

TO GO WITH Asia-health-economy-environment-toilets,FEATURE by Martin Abbugao A Indian man (L) washes as another comes out of a toilet in a toilet complex run by an NGO Sulabh International at railway station in New Delhi on April 23, 2011. Fast-growing Asian economies may be flush with money but filthy toilets remain a blight across the region despite rising standards of living, with dire effects on economies and public health. Social activists and travellers say dismal sanitation facilities are turning off tourists and causing preventable diseases in poor communities where people would readily spend money on a mobile phone but not a latrine. AFP PHOTO / Prakash SINGH

TO GO WITH India-health-women-crime-social,FOCUS BY ABHAYA SRIVASTAVA In this photograph taken on August 31, 2014, Indian villager Omwati cooks breakfast alongside a newly-constructed toliet provided by the Sulabh International NGO in the village of Katra Sahadatgunj. Decorated with marigolds and ribbons, 108 toilets unveiled in a tragedy-hit village are a small step in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's push to end open-air defecation for impoverished Indian women. AFP PHOTO/Prakash SINGH

A slum resident uses a toilet that opens into the water below as children swim in the water near a protest rally against the government for demolishing make-shift huts at Mandala in Mankhurd in north central Mumbai, 12 May 2006. In a demolition drive conducted on 09 May 2006, the workers of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) razed hundreds of hutments during which two girls and three women were rushed to hospital with burn injuries. The mass removal plan is part of a project to shift 200,000 families out of the city's slums into tenement blocks within the next three years, despite protests over tactics employed by officials and police. AFP PHOTO/Sebastian D'SOUZA

TO GO WITH India-health-women-crime-social,FOCUS BY ABHAYA SRIVASTAVA In this photograph taken on August 29, 2014, Indian village resident Salma washes utensils alongside newly-constructed toilets provided by the Sulabh International NGO in the Hirmathala village of Mewat district in the state of Haryana.Decorated with marigolds and ribbons, 108 toilets unveiled in a tragedy-hit village are a small step in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's push to end open-air defecation for impoverished Indian women. AFP PHOTO/Prakash SINGH

A temporary toilet made by farmers for their use is seen on World Toilet Day near the River Yamuna in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015. According to the United Nations, 2.4 billion people lack adequate sanitation and nearly one billion have no toilet facilities and are forced to relieve themselves in open areas. (AP Photo /Tsering Topgyal)

India’s Prime Minister Modi inaugurates world’s second biggest dam – on his own birthday

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated India’s biggest dam on Sunday, ignoring warnings from environment groups that hundreds of thousands of people will lose their livelihoods. Photo: Twitter

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Asia

South Asia

Every village in India now has electricity, but millions still live in darkness


Every village in India now has electricity, but millions still live in darkness.


Narendra Modi

India fully electric after last village gets connected … so the government claims

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Every village in India now has electricity, but millions still live in darkness

Every village in India now has electricity, but millions still live in darkness