As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the BJP, campaign for the 2019 elections, one of the feats that they will be showcasing is their flagship scheme Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana or Saubhagya Yojana. Its ambition is to provide “24X7 clean and affordable power for everyone” at a budget of Rs 16,320 crore.
The target date for universal electricity was 31 March 2019. As per the latest statistics on the scheme’s website, out of the total 26.04 million households targeted, 99.93 per cent of households have got electricity connections. The last-mile of 18,734 or 0.07 per cent of households are in Chhattisgarh.
These efforts started with former NDA PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, under whom the Electricity Act was ratified in 2003. Covering areas related to generation, distribution, transmission and trading in power, it sought to transform the power sector in India. The UPA government’s Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY), in 2005, embarked on the initial electrification process. This was re-christened as the Deendayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY) in 2014 by the Modi government.
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Media reports downplayed the significance of the Modi government’s initiatives in this sector by claiming that during the UPA regime, 1,09,524 villages had already been added to the grid under RGGVY and a mere 18,374 villages were added under the DDUGJY.
The government countered this with a clarification that prior to 2014, on an average only 1,730 villages were electrified. This number reached its lowest of 1,197 in 2013-14. However, more than 45,000 households were electrified every day over the last 18 months.
The Modi government also claimed that the Saubhagya scheme was targeting the 597,464 census villages and that the ones remaining were more challenging because they were located in relatively inaccessible geographical terrains or in Naxal-affected areas. As an extension of the DDUGJY, the Saubhagya Yojana that came into existence in 2017 was to target these last-mile connectivity areas.
A village, earlier, was deemed electrified if 10 per cent of its households got a connection. However, under the Saubhagya scheme, the shift is towards “intensive electrification” that deepens the electricity infrastructure to provide access to un-electrified households.
A household that is “willing” to get a connection is charged Rs 500 for it. The distribution company (DISCOMs) will recover this over 10 equal instalments. The scheme envisages the drawing of a service cable from the nearest electricity pole to the household. An electricity meter is installed along with wiring for a single light point with an LED bulb and a mobile charging point.
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There have been several changes in the goalposts for this scheme. The initial targets were 40 million households by March 2019. That number itself was slashed down to less than 30 million rural and urban households when it was discovered that many of these households did not exist or were already electrified. Uttar Pradesh, which was the laggard state in this scheme, slashed its targets from 12 million to 7.47 million.
This invited criticism from the opposition that the Modi government is merely manipulating figures to meet target deadlines. Yet, the confusing web of numbers that define what a census village is and how eligible households are determined, makes it a difficult task to assess progress, despite the government’s real-time online dashboard that does it.
There are still some problems to overcome. The median power supply has risen to 16 hours a day in 2018, against 12 hours in 2015. But round-the-clock supply is yet to be completely achieved. Although complaints of low voltage and voltage surges have decreased in the last three years, about 25 per cent households still report low voltage issues for at least five days a month.
Given the abysmal situation prior to this, this is not a bad statistic, although the perfection mark still eludes the government.
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Closely linked to the Saubhagya scheme is the UJALA (Unnat Jeevan by Affordable LEDs and Appliances) scheme launched by the Ministry of Power in 2015. India faces challenges in adequate power generation capacity. There are environmental concerns as well, given the carbon emissions. In this paradigm, UJALA promotes energy conservation and use of energy efficient products that lower consumption, as well as carbon emissions. UJALA’s website clocks in real-time data on state-wise distribution of subsidised LED bulbs, the cost savings per year for the consumers, the peak demand avoided and annual carbon-dioxide reduction. To date, the website reported 34.75 crore LED bulbs as having been distributed.
Rajendra Kumar Napit is the headmaster of a school in Dumra village in Jharkhand. Producing his identity card and electricity bills, he procured 160 LED bulbs for his school with a three-year warranty.
“Classrooms were not well-lit before, despite there being sporadic electricity. Now the LEDs have brightened up the class and most children who would strain to read in the dim light find it so much easier. Our electricity bills, too, have reduced drastically. In case of any malfunction, replacing these is easy too” said Napit.
G.S. Damral in Jammu switched from incandescent bulbs to LEDs under the UJALA scheme. “My wife has poor eyesight and would rush to finish her work before sunset. Now the house is so well-lit that she can manage to finish her work even at night. In our shop, too, where we need lighting all the time, I switched to LED and found a huge reduction in the consumed units. For instance, earlier on an average, the meter showed 323 units of consumption, now it is between 210-230 units. This is a huge saving of both cost as well as electricity,” added Damral.
The government has plans to provide induction stoves to rural and urban households in the future. This would hugely improve India’s per capita power consumption that is among the lowest in the world at around 1,200 kWh. Being the world’s third largest energy consumer, after the US and China, it would help India promote eco-friendly energy measures and thereby meet its global climate change commitments.
Even as the universalisation of electricity reaches its end-point in India, the focus needs to shift from power-to-all, to better quality of supply, improved customer services, closer end-user level monitoring and enhanced cost-savings at the household level. Given that electricity falls under the Concurrent List, both the Centre and the states need to strive towards streamlining against power theft attempts and illegal tapping of lines. The poor financial health of several state DISCOMs due to a wide range of issues plaguing the sector, particularly low collection and increasing costs of power purchase, need urgent redressal at the state government level. As the UJALA scheme demonstrates, the benefits need to slowly begin accruing from household consumption to other community needs such as health care and education.
This is the eighth part of a series on the author’s conversations with beneficiaries of schemes launched by the Narendra Modi government. Read the others here.
The author is a writer/historian/political analyst and a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, with an upcoming biography of Savarkar.