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PM Modi claims every Indian village now has electricity, Congress says BJP taking ‘fake credit’

"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!" PM Modi said.

Electrification all villages in the country, one of the government’s biggest promises, has been completed, claimed Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In a series of tweets on Sunday, Modi expressed his gratitude to all those involved in the project and announced that Leisang village in Manipur, was the last one to get access to electricity on Saturday.

“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.” Tagging a news report, Modi added, “Leisang village in Manipur, like the thousands of other villages across India has been powered and empowered!”

In his Independence speech in 2015, PM Modi had promised that the government will ensure the access of electricity to 18,000 villages which lived in darkness, within the next 1000 days. A village is considered electrified if it has the basic electrical infrastructure and 10 percent of its households and public places including schools, local administrative offices and health centres have power.

The World Bank said in a report last year that globally 1.06 billion people had no electricity, with India and Nigeria topping the list of most power-deficient countries. According to the government data, all of India’s 597,464 census villages have been electrified. With an aim to provide electricity to over four crore families in rural and urban areas by December 2018, PM Modi in September had launched Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana ‘Saubhagya’, a Rs 16,320-crore scheme ushered in for the upliftment for the underprivileged section. He had also launched Deendayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana to initiate electrical reforms in rural villages.

Reacting to BJP’s claims, Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said that it was Congress that electrified 97 per cent of villages in the country but “did not boast”. “On 26th May,2014; only 18,452 villages were without electrification. BJP Govt took 46 months to complete this at at an average of 4,813 villages per year. This is – ‘celebrating inefficiencies’ & taking ‘fake credit’ for Congress work,” he said on Twitter.