Modi govt recycles promise for 'power for all', shifting deadlines to suit election cycle

How many times can you sell the same dream to the same set of people? That question can be put to the NDA government, against the background of the 'Saubhagya' scheme that Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched on 25 September. The scheme promises power for all by December 2018, but this is not the first time that this promise has been made.

The original promise was power for all by May 2018. The targeted date was later amended to May 2017. Now, it has once again been reset by pushing it to December 2018. What is worse, there is no explanation for the extension of the deadline. There is not even an admission of failure to meet it.

The timeline

Let us took at this timeline in detail. It was during his Independence Day address in 2015 that Modi first announced that his government had “resolved to connect with electricity, all the 18,500 villages which still remain without power, within the next 1,000 days”.

That worked out to May 2018.

A year later, the then power minister Piyush Goyal promised that the target would be met a year earlier than the PM's deadline, in May 2017.

Come September 2017, and the deadline has once again been tinkered with. Interestingly, the latest date announced by Modi, December 2018, is much later than not just Goyal's revised deadline of May 2017, but even Modi's original deadline of May 2018.

Do you see what the government just did there? It basically failed to meet its deadline and it didn't even let you notice that, let alone honestly admit its failure. Doesn't the country deserve an explanation, such as what were the factors that prevented the government from achieving total electrification on schedule and how does it plan to tackle those factors now?

The nation wants to know

This is just one part of the problem. We are not even talking about the real definition of electrification and how it is different from a regular supply of electricity to every household in the country. (The government has just recently started moving its target from electrification of every village to electrification of every household.)

Or the fact that electricity is a concurrent subject and its round the clock supply is within the purview of the state governments. The Union government supplements the efforts of state governments by allocating power to them through its own power companies. If a state government is unable to ensure supply of regular power for all households in that state, the blame for it will not lie mainly on the Union government's door-step.

Likewise, wherever that dream becomes reality, credit can, at best, be claimed equally by both governments and not Delhi alone.

Saubhagya, the 'new' scheme, is at least the seventh scheme launched by the Modi government with the slogan of 'power for all', with GARV, GARV-II, IPDS, DDUGJY, UDAY and UJALA having already been launched earlier.

According to the government's announcement, Saubhagya will have a total outlay of Rs 16, 320 crores. Among the other schemes announced earlier, the total grant for IPDS alone was another Rs 16,019 crores. Explanation is yet to emerge whether that is the money for Saubhagya additional expenditure or it subsumes within itself the funds allocated for the earlier schemes.

The government has further announced that for Saubhagya, the beneficiaries for providing free electricity connections would be identified using data from the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) of 2011. The caste part of that data is yet to be made public, so only the economic part of the data will be used. Some independent studies done earlier on the Public Distribution System have already claimed that this data is not entirely accurate.

The government probably knows that, because the Saubhagya statement says that “un-electrified households not covered under the SECC data would also be provided electricity connections under the scheme”. However, they will be charged for it. Connections for such families will come at a premium of Rs 500, which DISCOMs will be empowered to collect from them in 10 instalments, through the electricity bill.

This will probably be the first time in the history of the country's power sector that the state will charge a fee from poor families for bringing electricity to their homes. Even under the NDA government's Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY), BPL families get free electricity connection. In fact, as of 30 June 2017, free electricity service connection had been provided to to 2.63 crore BPL households.

It is clear that as far as Saubhagya is concerned, there are many questions that Modi government needs to answer. Can it begin with offering some clarity on the multiple deadlines?