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Power

All Indian Villages Now Have Access To Electricity (indiatimes.com) 108

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: All Indian villages now 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 Prime Minister 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, a small state in Eastern India. 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.
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All Indian Villages Now Have Access To Electricity More

All Indian Villages Now Have Access To Electricity

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  • Next Step (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Monday April 30, 2018 @01:44AM (#56526971)

    Today: electricity. Tomorrow: toilets!

    • Re:Next Step (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gopla ( 597381 ) on Monday April 30, 2018 @03:46AM (#56527321) Journal

      In two words you have captured the essential part of this news. It is not only toilets tomorrow but also cooking gas for all liberating women from smoke and related health issues. Next is moving the mass of people to formal banking, with potential change over less cash economy.

      The impact of this will be felt worldwide in the next 10 years. If USA is exhausted of Indian coders when India has just 40 % toilet coverage, 60 % electricity access and less than 50 % families with a bank account, imagine the scenario 10 years from now with 100 % population having middle class facilities. India is massively cleaning up its streets and rivers. Building road and rail infrastructure.

      It is going through the phase which China went through three decades ago.

      • Re:Next Step (Score:5, Informative)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday April 30, 2018 @04:14AM (#56527369)

        Open defecation is different from the other problems. It is not merely a lack of resources or infrastructure. It is also deeply cultural. The Indian government has actually had better luck getting the poor to use communal toilets and latrines than their better off neighbors. They don't want to be seen using the same facilities as a bunch of dirty Dalits.

        Bangladesh has nearly eliminated open defecation, and has seen a seven-fold drop in early childhood mortality from diarrhea. They are doing better than India despite being a poorer country.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gopla ( 597381 )

          True about Bangladesh. I also agree that the reason about open defecation may also be cultural. Yet, Indians are more pragmatic than what you think. Until now there was no focused effort to address this problem. Not any more. Just like this 1000 day target to electrify all villages, the target to get all villages and cities open defecation free is Oct. 2019. It is progressing well as far as I can tell.

          Changes in Indian society occur at much faster rate than you can imagine. Indians are not zealots, can ad

          • Indians are not zealots, can adopt quickly and see the logic

            Of course aside from religion, where the word "zealot" actually comes from.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rsborg ( 111459 )

              Indians are not zealots, can adopt quickly and see the logic

              Of course aside from religion, where the word "zealot" actually comes from.

              What does a greek word about a particular Jewish sect have to do with India? Or is this some really vague Starcraft reference?

              https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]

              • One who is zealous, one who is full of zeal for his own specific beliefs or objectives, usually in the negative sense of being too passionate; a fanatic

                Exactly!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Toilets are actually harder to do than electricity, which is why electricity happened first. For electricity you can use above-ground wires and local generation system. Burying pipes is much more labour intensive and expensive, and so is finding and fixing the leaks.

            Good luck to them.

          • They can adopt quickly and see the logic. Then why hasn't anyone told them before? They have had a very long time to notice even if the civilized countries forgot to tell them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        The global warming message still not getting through it seems.

    • Don't laugh. Some of my in-laws are in India setting up hand washing stations by the community toilets. They developed and manufacture an inexpensive setup that is also low water use. Sanitation remains a serious issue for villagers. Many children die in India from diarrhea due to lack of sanitation.

    • Three words. Designated shitting streets.

  • Canada cant even say that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      Neither can US, for the same geographical reasons as Canada:
      https://www.adn.com/rural-alas... [adn.com]

      • Both of you are confused. TFA doesn't talk about centralised power grids; it specifically mentions villages which generate their own power via solar.

        It also mentions that their definition of access is 10% of a community having electricity.

        By those standards, yes, both Canada and the US can make the same claim, and then some. I've been to some of the most remote communities in the Arctic; they all have electricity and plenty of it.

        • Before anyone corrects me, yes, I misread TFA. Dammit.

          On the other hand, remote Canadian communities still do have much better electrical infrastructure even if we can't get them connected to the rest of our grid.

  • Nothing to do with PM (Score:4, Informative)

    by asvravi ( 1236558 ) on Monday April 30, 2018 @01:58AM (#56527041)

    This has nothing to do with the PM's promise. Electrification was proceeding for decades even before he came to power or made the announcement, in fact at a faster rate. In the 10 years before, the village electrification percentage went from 78%to 96%. Only the last 4% was completed in the past 4 years. So electrification actually slowed down after he made the announcement!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Maybe because those last 4% were extremely hard to get to?

      I admittedly have no idea about India's infrastructure or finer geography, the locations of their villages etc., but compare it to coding: You'll crank out 95% of a program fast, going through all the easy sections like buttons doing what they say they should and so on, and then you'll spend forever on the last 5% to make sure everything works -together-.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gopla ( 597381 )

        You are right in your assessment. The last few villages were tough. They were located in dense forests or in higher altitudes of himalay. Some were even in the places affected by terrorism.

        See for example this case. Chhattisgarh's Maoist-hit village gets electricity after 15 years. [indiatimes.com]. The light vanished from the Chintalnar village when Maoists, in a bid to disrupt the development activities in the district, uprooted electricity poles. Bringing back electricity to such villages was a tough job. I am happy

      • Maybe because those last 4% were extremely hard to get to?

        I admittedly have no idea about India's infrastructure or finer geography, the locations of their villages etc., but compare it to coding: You'll crank out 95% of a program fast, going through all the easy sections like buttons doing what they say they should and so on, and then you'll spend forever on the last 5% to make sure everything works -together-.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.[1]

        —Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      The fact that it was delivered only 13 days before that 1000 days ran out, makes me think this was all carefully planned out long before he made the announcement.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gopla ( 597381 )

        Politicians who are sincere in keeping their promises to deliver, plan their work before making public announcements. What is wrong with this?

    • First of all, of course a project like this slows down near the end. The last few villages are more than likely the most difficult to reach.

      Second of all, at least the PM didn't announce that those last remaining villages weren't worth the effort.

    • So, as every other politician in the world this PM just promised something that was about to happen regardless of his intervention and got credit for it

    • Like cleaning up a pile of Lego bricks on the floor, the big ones clean up fast, it's all the little, hard to see ones that take the most time.

    • Not only that - it may not even be actually complete - https://www.indiatoday.in/indi... [indiatoday.in]

  • India is a country that developed nuclear weapons and intercontinental rockets, in that light I find it worrisome it took them so long to get basic infrastructure to their remote villages.
    Yes national security is important but a happy population and good infrastructure are so too.
    • Yeah, well, have you thought of the scale of the effort required to wire up 597,464 villages? It's comparatively simpler to develop some rockets. Also politician probably prioritised the weapons since they probably guessed it would be more politically profitable

  • Yes, but most PEOPLE still don't have it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This article is worded to make you think that ALL Indians in all these villages now have electricity in their homes -they don't. There are still millions of Indians without electricity in their houses.

    And as somebody else said - what about toilets, which are even more important?

  • definition of "electricity access ready" (Score:4, Informative)

    by thej1nx ( 763573 ) on Monday April 30, 2018 @06:22AM (#56527893)

    In case you didn't know, PM Modi's clever spin is that if his government has put up even a single pole in a whole village, providing electricity to say a govt office there, or put up even several poles but no electric cables on them and so on, in theory the village is "electricity access ready". The argument here being that whenever the lines are actually connected to the power grid, the electricity will be arriving, since "the poles are already installed".

    http://www.business-standard.c... [business-standard.com]

    The current ruling party has apparently learned that hiring social media IT teams tha spam social media with lies and exaggerations and feel-good promises is a good way of scoring votes, instead of needing to do any actual development work.

  • 1.) How is the electricity generated?

    2.) How many days a year does the electricity go out (on average)?

  • Certainly not the case for native American Indians: https://indiancountrymedianetw... [indiancoun...etwork.com]

  • Just climb that pole [blogspot.com] with your extension cord and hook yourself up.

  • Ten percent of households electrified=village is electrified? That's not much to brag about.
  • Ref: 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 Absolutely not That only means 10% of a village is electrified.. 10 is too low of a number to consider the whole village electrified.

  • Modi regime fulfilled just 9% of his 2014 poll promises http://www.electionpromisestra... [electionpr...tracker.in]

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