Electricity has reached every Indian village, govt fulfilled commitment to 'transform' lives, says Narendra Modi

One of the biggest election promises the Bharatiya Janata Party made before coming to power in 2014 — the promise of ensuring access to electricity for every village in India — was achieved on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed on Sunday.

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.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 29, 2018

“Leisang village in Manipur, like the thousands of other villages across India has been powered and empowered! This news will make every Indian proud and delighted,” he said on Sunday. Leisang was the last village to receive electricity on Saturday. [caption id=“attachment_3931893” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational Image. Reuters[/caption] A village is recognised as electrified if it has basic electrical infrastructure and 10 percent of its households and public places — including schools, panchayat office and health centre — have access to electricity, an NDTV report said. In his speech from the Red Fort on Independence Day in 2015, the prime minister promised that all villages where electricity was yet to reach, will have power within a thousand days, the report pointed out. Sharing multiple pictures of the work underway to ensure better access to electricity in Indian villages, Modi said, “I salute the efforts of all those who worked tirelessly on the ground, including the team of officials, the technical staff and all others, to make this dream of a Powerful India a reality. Their efforts today will help generations of Indians in the coming years.” The prime minister quoted a  Livemint report on Twitter which said that all of India’s 5,97,464 census villages have been electrified, according to government data. At the onset of the Rs 75,893 crore Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana for village electrification, there were 18,452 un-electrified census villages when the project began. During the project work it was found out that an additional 1,275 villages also didn’t have access to electricity, the report added, all of which have now got electricity access. “We are just absolutely thrilled, excited and delighted. We have fulfilled our mandate, our promise and the work allotted to us by the government and the prime minister,” PV Ramesh, chairman of Rural Electrification corporation, told Livemint.