New Delhi: The Centre may soon have to work on changing the definition of an ‘electrified village’, as despite its aggressive push towards ensuring power supply to all households of the country, there are still more than 4 crore households which are yet to be electrified, even though there are 99.4 per cent ‘electrified villages’ in the nation.
Highly-placed sources have indicated that the Union power ministry may look into the possibility of declaring a village ‘fully electrified’ once all its households receive power supply.
With the NDA Government aggressively pushing its ‘24x7 Power for All’ agenda, the technicality seems to have put it on the backfoot and therefore a relook at the definition seems imminent.
According to the official definition of an ‘electrified village’, a village with only 10 per cent households getting power supply is declared as ‘electrified’. In other words, despite 90 per cent of households in a village getting no electricity, it is considered as fully electrified.
What seems to have put the Centre into a quandry is that according to the current definition, 99.4 per cent villages are electrified, but at the same time more than 4 crore households in the country are still deprived of electricity connection.
This seems to be sending a misleading signal and therefore sources privy to developments said that a relook may soon be initiated. It has been brought to the notice of the Power Ministry through stakeholders that the present definition does not reflect the true picture of universal access to electricity status in the country.
Thus, only when all the households in a village start receiving power supply, should a village be declared as fully electrified.
The anomaly needs to be rectified soon as the power ministry has already signed ‘24x7 Power for All’ documents with all the states, which makes them beneficiaries of the Centre’s ambitious Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana, or rural electrification scheme.
This scheme, along with a slew of other such initiatives, is aimed at helping states provide uninterrupted power supply to every households. Only when the definition of a fully electrified village will be properly defined, that the objective of providing power to rural households, will be fully achieved.
