More than 40 million families in rural and urban India – roughly a quarter of the population \u2013 will be covered by the “Saubhagya scheme”, will largely be funded by the federal government.<\/p>\n
The government also aims to provide free electricity to poor families identified by them based on socio-economic data.<\/p>\n
“Rs 16,000 crore will be spent to bring a monumental change in the lives of the poor,” the PM said.<\/p>\n
Currently, of India’s 1.3 billion people, about 300 million are still not connected to the electricity distribution grid.<\/p>\n
Although the households to be covered by the new scheme are spread across the country, it primarily targets rural India where electrification rates are much lower.<\/p>\n
Across the country, millions of rural Indians still rely on lamps fuelled by kerosene, which posts a huge health and environmental hazard and restricting its use would further India’s ambitious climate goal to cut emissions.<\/p>\n
In July 2015, the federal government launched an electrification programme, under which thousands of villages were connected to the grid.<\/p>\n
However, under the new Saubhagya scheme, individual households will be targeted rather than villages.<\/p>\n
This is because a village is declared as electrified if 10% of households, schools, health centres and government offices have access to electricity.<\/p>\n
The government has said it will distribute solar packs (comprising LED lights, a fan and a plug) and a battery bank to households in villages in more remote, often inaccessible areas.<\/p>\n
Such a scheme will also expand the consumer base of state-owned power distribution companies that are struggling with debt and poor demand, according to experts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced the launching of a 16bn rupee scheme ($2.5bn; \u00a31.8bn) to electrify all households by December 2018. More than 40 million families in rural and urban India – roughly a quarter of the population \u2013 will be covered by the “Saubhagya scheme”, will largely be funded by the federal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":24227,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}