All Indian villages now have access to power supply.

HIGHLIGHTS

• All 597,464 inhabited villages in the country now have access to power

• Manipur's Leisang village became the last non-electrified inhabited village to join India's mainline supply network on Saturday

• A village is considered electrified if 10% of its households and public places such as schools etc have access to electricity

Manipur's Leisang village became the last non-electrified inhabited village to join India's mainline supply network at 5.30pm on Saturday, an important milestone in the country's journey towards universal electricity access.

This means that all 597,464 inhabited villages in the country now have access to power, fulfilling a promise the PM had made on August 15, 2015, when he announced that all unelectrified villages would get power over the next 1,000 days.

The last inhabited village to be powered through the off-grid system — isolated supply networks, mostly with solar power plants — was Pakol, also in Manipur.

While basic infrastructure such as distribution transformer and lines need to be set up in inhabited localities, including Dalit hamlets, a village is considered electrified if 10 per cent of its households and public places such as schools, panchayat office and health centre have access to electricity.

Having fulfilled that promise, the PM took to Twitter in a big way. "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," he said in a series of tweets.

At the time of Modi's announcement in August 2015, data showed 18,452 villages without power. When work on village electrification started, another 1,275 villages were found to be without access to electricity. Some 1,200 villages are uninhabited and 35 were notified as grazing reserves.

"Village electrification means that the infrastructure to supply power has now reached certain parts of the village. The next step should be to focus on providing connection to all households and ensuring adequate power supply to these homes," former power secretary P Uma Shankar said.

While villages have the power infrastructure, it is now up to households to seek a connection and for state governments to ensure supply. "Village electrification and household electrification are different things. It is up to the people to seek a connection," added R V Shahi, another former power secretary.

After electrifying all villages, the real challenge now is to feed power to each household in those — indeed, all — villages, a task being undertaken through the Saubhagya scheme.

The seeds of 100 per cent village electrification were sowed with the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJUY), a scheme with a projected outlay of Rs 76,000 crore, that Modi had launched on July 25, 2015. This scheme drew from Modi's successful experiment as Gujarat chief minister to separate farm and household feeders in rural areas to ensure 24x7 power to households and assured supply to farmers.

One of the key objectives of the DDUGJUY was to achieve 100 per cent village electrification. It also envisaged separating feeders, strengthening distribution network, metering at all levels and setting up micro grid and off-grid distribution networks. (Source: The Times of India)