Is Modi lying about 100% Indian villages being electrified?
Former US vice-president Al Gore, who narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to George Bush, had once punctured his political rival for taking false credit with this stinging quote: "George Bush taking credit for the wall coming down is like the rooster taking credit for the sun rising."
In politics, taking false credit for “achievements" is nothing new. It has been happening worldwide for millennia and will continue to happen. We have the latest example of political bravado as the Narendra Modi government thumped its chest and took false credit over the weekend for electrifying all 597,474 inhabited villages.
The Modi government unabashedly taking false credit for the gargantuan national task of electrification of all Indian villages and appropriating the work done by previous governments in 67 years before it came to power four years ago inevitably triggered a strong protest from the main Opposition Congress party. Sample a series of tweets by Congress leader and former Union finance minister P Chidambaram:
After connecting 18,452 villages, PM claims that all 5,97,464 villages have been electrified. Good. But will PM please tell us who electrified the 5,79,012 villages before Mr Modi became PM?
— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) May 1, 2018
After connecting 18,452 villages, PM claims that all 5,97,464 villages have been electrified. Good. But will PM please tell us who electrified the 5,79,012 villages before Mr Modi became PM?
— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) May 1, 2018
Is it not true that 5,61,613 villages (94%) had been electrified by October 2013, long before Mr Modi became PM?
— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) May 1, 2018
PM is fond of saying 'nothing was done in the past 65 years'. If nothing was done, how did 5,79,012 villages get electricity before Mr Modi became PM?
— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) May 1, 2018
Credit goes to all the governments before Modi Sarkar. And remember, out of the 67 years, Congress government was in Delhi for 54 years, other parties including Mr Vajpayee's BJP for 13 years.
— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) May 1, 2018
For its part, the BJP, finding itself pushed to the wall, hit back and retorted that while the entire nation was celebrating power for every single village, the Congress was “mourning” the loss of power for one family. However, no BJP leader or government minister has bothered to address the fundamental issue as to how could Modi government appropriate the electrification work done by previous governments since Independence.
The Union power ministry also did its bit of window-dressing and spin-doctoring. A day after the Modi government announced electrification of the very last inhabited village, Leisang in Manipur's Senapati district, and claimed that with this all villages in India were now electrified, the power ministry came up with a press release on April 30 evening, clarifying that the definition of village electrification - of connecting at least 10 per cent households in it - had lost relevance in view of the actual levels of electrification achieved.
It also stated that the average actual household electrification level in rural areas is more than 82 per cent with variations across states. The entire press release of the power ministry can be read here.
Congress spokesperson Gourav Vallabh has raised a pertinent point by saying thus: “The average electrification of villages, from 2005 to 2014, was around 12,000 villages per year. Now, under the current Modi government, it is 4,800 villages per year. So they (NDA) are working at 40 per cent of our (UPA’s) average efficiency. As far as providing electrical connections to households, our average was 47 lakh households per year.”
The Modi government has obviously used the plank of electrification of all 597,474 inhabited villages in the country to electrify its own campaign for the Karnataka Assembly elections and reach out to the people of Karnataka to win the state by ousting the Congress from power. Karnataka goes to polls on May 12 and the results will be out on May 15.
It's a carefully timed political gimmick by the Modi government aimed at Karnataka polls and to put the 24th state in BJP’s kitty. The BJP top brass is cleverly playing the development card in Karnataka unlike the communal card it had so subtly and effectively played in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls last year where prime minister Narendra Modi's Diwali-Ramzan and shamshaan-kabristan remarks had changed the political narrative in BJP’s favour in a big way.
However, in this political cacophony some bigger and meatier issues of national importance have been buried.
1) As many as 32 million or 3.2 crore people of India still continue to live without electricity more than seven decades after Independence.
2) The real challenge is electrification of every household for which the government has set a deadline of December 31, 2018. It's a highly ambitious deadline which seems quite unrealistic. Taking electricity to millions of households (more than half of which are in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar alone where the BJP is in power) within next eight months seems to be an empty rhetoric driven by political imperatives.
3) Losses of discoms are as high as over 24 per cent. Without reducing these, the national mission of electricity for all cannot be achieved.
4) It's not electricity-for-all which matters alone. Equally important is the need to provide uninterrupted round-the-clock power supply to every citizen and that too at affordable rates.
5) It will take at least a decade, if not longer, for meeting all these parameters. Celebrating over just a piece of statistics like the last inhabited village of India getting electrified is celebrating a bit too early, not unlike the BJP’s misfired 2004 general elections slogan of “India Shining” and not unlike a cricketer celebrating a batsman getting clean bowled on a no ball.
After all, don't Indian citizens find it a bit weird that all inhabited villages in the country have been electrified when a simpler and more basic need of potable drinking water in every village is still a far cry?