required pace under your flagship.
There is a village known as Haldu Khata in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh which is one of the 9,326 villages that you entitle to have “electrified” under DDUGJY scheme last year. But the ground reality is that still there is no electrical infrastructure in the village. Likewise, there are many villages like Dimatala from Assam, Kadam Jheriya in Chhattisgarh, Buknari in Bihar and Sanwara from Madhya Pradesh have been wrongly categorised as electrified in your list. Sir, these are not the special cases. In fact, the number of villages mentioned to be electrified last year is inflated.
Our Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his speech on last Independence Day of 2015, had declared that all the remaining villages would see a light within 1,000 days.
Sir, as of April 1, 2015 (this is the latest data you provided), there are still 18,452 villages staying in dark for all the 24 hours. Just to remind you, a village should be declared as electrified if the public places in village and 10 per cent of its household have access to electricity. Unfortunately the website data of GARV dashboard reflects the erroneous statistics.
You have also appointed 309 Gram Vidyut Abhiyantas (GVAs) to monitor the progress and enter the data on GARV dashboard. But, the data provided by them is also indecorous.
One key source of inconsistency is about those villages where the GVA has distinguished that the village is un-electrified, yet it is reckoned as electrified on the app. There are over 30 such villages on the app after scanning through GVAs’ comments. When I got a chance to speak with one of the officials of the Rural Electrification Corporation (REC), the nodal agency for rural electrification which functions under your guidance, clarified “they put a lot of stress on photos. If there is a pole and distribution line visible in the photos, they call it electrified.” This maybe one of the causes leading to the exaggerated number, as the existence of electrical infrastructure doesn’t inevitably interpret into electrification.
Sir, if you look closely the comments of some GVAs, you will notice the blunder they are making. A GVA from Pagara Buzurg village in Neemuch district of Madhya Pradesh mentioned a comment on GARV dashboard that the contractor laid power lines in the village, but they were stolen before they could be powered-up, and now there is no electricity in the village. Neither does a conductor exist there. For Birni village in Giridih, Jharkhand, GVA comments: “Work not in progress. Village located in remote location. No roads to reach. Situated on mountains, naxalite affected area.” But still both villages are reckoned as electrified villages.
There are 342 villages where the status marked by the GVA was ‘e0’, which means un-electrified (‘ee’ and ‘en’ mean electrified). However, in the ‘overall’ category, all of these villages have been marked as electrified. Further, as of July 10, 2016, for around 300 villages, the status said: “Village declared electrified by DISCOM [power Distribution Company]; GVA still to visit the village for verification.”
This shows that villages have been confirmed as electrified without waiting for your own representative’s authentication, rendering the monitoring system redundant. For many others, a pattern is observed where the date of electrification is way before the first visit made by GVA. The lacuna is, if the GVA marks it as un-electrified after visiting, the status is not updated from ‘electrified’ to ‘un-electrified’.
Additional issue is that unoccupied villages have been marked as electrified. The villages Panalomali, Kusadangar, Patyetapali in Odisha and Sunwara in Madhya Pradesh; all totaled as electrified villages contrary to the fact of no people residing there. Reading remarks in the dashboard, more such villages were found such as Akbarpur in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, which is a forest area.
Sir, honorable Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in his Budget speech of 2016, said that the number of villages electrified in the last year was more than the combined number in the past three years. This claim may not be true, as out of the 9,326-plus villages said to be electrified till date, 3,713 villages were assigned the status, “Village found electrified during the survey.” This means that these villages were found electrified when GVAs first visited there. The REC officials in private conversation admit that it is difficult to say when the work was done as the GVA visits started in October 2015. It could have happened after April 2015 (when the list of un-electrified villages was formed in consultation with state governments), maybe two years ago or even earlier. Comments from the dashboard indicate that perhaps even the list of un-electrified villages was misjudged.
For example, Changlang (Arunachal Pradesh) was electrified in 2001, Farbandhia Kahar (Assam) in 2012 and Mahdaili (Bihar) in 2013. But they were shown as un-electrified on the April 2015 list. It is also worth noting that work is ongoing even in villages declared as electrified; called “intensive electrification”, this aims to cover all households and not just 10 per cent.
In view of this, it is humble request to you, that besides the political agenda, please correct the figures so that a common man should not be misled about the information and also the people who are residing in those un-electrified villages should be aware of the correct status.
Change of name
The rural electrification scheme is being carried out since the era of erstwhile government under the name of “Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana” (RGGVY) for which you merely changed the title to “Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana” (DDUGJY)

Vashi resident