Fields for toilets, quacks for doctors, and now, bamboo sticks for electricity poles – seems like rural India is having to wing it in more ways than one. With electricity poles being alien to their village so far, the residents of Varanasi district’s Mokulpur have had to improvise in ways that render the term “jugaad” redundant. The outcome is that the village gets its electricity from a criss-cross of high voltage wires delicately balanced on flimsy bamboo sticks thrust into the ground. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD While some of us take things like electricity and running water for granted, life is not so simple when you are someone navigating rural India on a daily basis. Take Mokulpur’s Babu Nishad for instance, for whom the gaping absence of electricity poles, and the resultant danger of loose electricity wires, is just another everyday problem to deal with. “Yes, such an arrangement of having electricity wires hanging from bamboo sticks poses a threat to our lives, but do you see any electricity poles in our village? What can we do in a situation where we are not provided with anything that can stand support for electricity wires?” Left to their own devices, the villagers have resorted to sharing the electricity pole of a neighbouring village, to which they have attached wires which bring the electricity back to their Mokulpur. The dangers of such an arrangement are several. The villagers have had to use whatever quality of wires are available, and not those which are particularly made to carry such high voltages of electricity. This will not only lead to electricity supply being highly erratic, but also has the potential to cause short circuits and electrical fires. Every time Chanda’s husband or children venture out of the house, she is fraught with worry that the wire passing over their house may fall and injure one of them. “One end of the wire is tied to our gate, can you imagine how dangerous that is? It can fall anytime on any of us. They should provide us proper electricity poles so that we can finally live in peace.” The mission statement of the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana, popularly called “Saubhagya”, is to achieve universal electrification by providing electricity to all remaining un-electrified households and reducing dependency on kerosene in rural as well as urban areas of the country. The scheme envisages providing free electricity connections or, in the alternate, providing solar packs with battery banks to households situated in remote and inaccessible areas of the country. While beneficiaries are to be identified using socio-economic and caste census data from 2011, household surveys are also to be conducted through mobile apps. The Saubhagya website already boasts of having electrified 1.91 crore households out of the 3 crore identified households since October 2017. The statistics also claim that the remaining un-electrified households only comprise 5% of total rural households in the country. But if the example of Mokulpur is anything to go by, “electrified” here seems to carry the crudest possible meaning of the word, i.e. providing electricity in any odd way, without paying heed to standard safety protocols. Impact Shorts More Shorts No rain in Delhi after cloud seeding trials. Why did the experiment flop? Chinese nationals control instant loan, crypto frauds in India: ED report Mokulpur is already seeing the dangers of having loose electricity wires running solely on the support of feeble bamboo sticks in their village. In addition to the numerable people who have lost their lives over the last few years, a wire recently fell on two young men passing by on a motorcycle as well. However, they miraculously managed to escape unscathed since there was no current running in the wires at the time. Considering this must be a routine occurrence, Golu, who witnessed the incident, did not seem very shocked as he explained that the wire fell because of a strong wind. The villagers have found creative ways to deal with this too. For example, they have tied heavy bricks and stones to the wires to keep them stable and balanced against strong winds or flying birds. Moreover, now they have begun tying the wires over open fields and farms, instead of houses, so as to prevent exposure of people to this constant danger. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The local official, Chandrashekhar Kumar, seemed too busy to answer our queries about the fate of Mokulpur. “It will be fixed in 10-15 days,” he said, without once looking up from his desk. “Everything is temporary here, we have had to make do with whatever we can,” says a tired-looking Shankar, speaking for all of Mokulpur.