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Rural lighting row: Goyal slaps notice on UP discom
NEW DELHI: As many continue to highlight mistakes in the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on Independence Day, power minister Piyush Goyal has come to his rescue,
NEW DELHI: As many continue to highlight mistakes in the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on Independence Day, power minister Piyush Goyal has come to his rescue, after a fashion.
Goyal has filed a show-cause notice against a state-owned power distribution company, Dakshinanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd (DVVNL) in Uttar Pradesh, to get to the bottom of the controversy surrounding the electrification of Nagla Fatela village in the state’s Hathras district.
“It takes only three hours to reach Nagla Fatela. But it took 70 years for electricity to reach there,” Modi remarked during his speech on August 15.
This kicked up a storm, as the village, which lies 300km away from Delhi, continues to live in darkness. Various opposition members of Parliament and Uttar Pradesh legislators have also attacked the PM following the statement and the revelation.
“The information provided to the PMO on electrification of villages is based on data provided by DVVNL. I don’t manufacture data,” Piyush Goyal told HT.
Goyal pointed to emails and letters received by the power ministry since 2013 for the electrification of Hathras district and the many villages within it, including Nagla Fatela.
“The sanction letter went out in January 2014. We got a mail from DVVNL, we were informed that 82 above poverty line (APL) households have been electrified. The mail also confirms creation of infrastructure for electrification,” Goyal said pointing to the mail from DVVNL that he received in November last year.
These mails are part of regular correspondence between the central power ministry and DVVNL. The discom also informed the union government that the project for electrifying several villages including Nagla Fatela was awarded to Accurate Transformers in 2014. The showcause notice, seen by
HT, gives DVVNL three days to respond. “We want to know why they told us that the village has been energised while in reality is has not,” Goyal said.
The Prime Minister has been criticised on several occasions about the inaccuracy of the facts he presents. While rural electrification has also received its fair share of controversy, claims made by Goyal’s ministry on electrification of villages under the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana have been contested in the past, with the power ministry’s defence being that data on the number and names of villages electrified is based on information from the states.
“It is not possible for us to go to each village and check. For this we will have to depend on information provided by state governments. We at the centre have always been more than eager to facilitate and provide funds for electrification,” clarified Goyal.
