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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Modi's Saubhagya scheme to provide 40 million electricity connections: Some hype, some confusion -Nitin Sethi

Modi's Saubhagya scheme to provide 40 million electricity connections: Some hype, some confusion -Nitin Sethi

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published Published on Sep 26, 2017   modified Modified on Sep 26, 2017
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A scheme to give India’s poor people free power connections has been in operation since 2005. But the capacity to provide 24x7 power is still a dream.

On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the “Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana” or the Saubhagya scheme to provide electricity connections to Indians who do not have them.

“The government will connect each house, whether it is in village, a city or in remote locations,” Modi said in his speech. “No poor [person] will have to pay for the connection. The government will go to each such poor [person’s] house and give a connection. A connection without spending a rupee. This will cost more than Rs 16,000 crore. We have decided that no poor [person] will bear this burden.”

On the fact of it, this did not seem startlingly new. Under the Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojna launched in July 2015, the central government already gives subsidies to states to provide free connections to people living below the poverty line. Besides, the Deendayal Yojna was a revised version of the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government had announced in 2005. Under that programme too, the central government gave a subsidy to states to provide free electricity connections that the poor.

It was left to Union Power Minister RK Singh to highlight what was novel in the scheme that Prime Minister Modi had announced. Under the Saubhagya scheme, Singh said, people above the poverty line would have to pay only Rs 500 per connection in 10 instalments. He said that the government would install prepaid meters and that consumers would have to pay in advance to buy a fixed amount of electricity – quite like they would do for a prepaid phone connection.

Only for the willing

Later on Monday evening the government’s Press Information Bureau put out some more information on the scheme. It noted the scheme was to “ensure electrification of all willing households in the country in rural as well as urban areas”.

How the government will define those willing or unwilling to have an electricity connection installed was not explained. The release said that “beneficiaries for free electricity connections would be identified using Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 data”.

The census was conducted in 2011 to replace the use of traditional poverty line-based identification of beneficiaries for government schemes. In a way, the government repeated on Tuesday what India’s poor have already been promised.

The rest – those who are not deemed poor – would have to pay Rs 500 in instalments, the press release said. As it now stands, some states such as Uttar Pradesh charge people below the poverty line Rs 810 for a basic 1 kilowatt connection and up to Rs 1,460 from others for a basic connection. This includes the costs of running power lines to their homes. It is not clear if the government’s new scheme will cover this or other costs, though the prime minister suggested so in his speech. It is also not clear what power load these connections will carry. Currently, besides giving poor people free connections, some states give them free electricity up to certain limits each month.

It isn’t immediately clear how the government will use the SECC data of 2011 to identify poor people living without electricity. The census does not separately identify rural households without electricity, though it did survey how many households in urban India use electricity as their primary source of lighting. The survey found that 33.55 lakh households do so.

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Scroll.in, 26 September, 2017, https://scroll.in/article/851919/modis-saubhagya-scheme-to-provide-40-million-electricity-connections-some-hype-some-confusion


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