Earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, claimed that the NDA government had achieved 100 per cent electrification of villages in India. That might be true, but what the PM conveniently skipped to mention, is that 95.6 per cent of villages had been electrified before May 2014, under the UPA regime.
Even today, Bhartiya Janta Party IT Cell head, Amit Malviya, claimed that the BJP has electrified 18,374 villages in “just” 4 years.
However, considering the official stats, this number is far lower than that of the Congress’.
In the year 2006 alone, the Congress had electrified more than 28,700 villages.
If we analyse the data for four years under the UPA, from 2009-2013, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government had successfully electrified 48,398 villages. Almost thrice as many as the BJP has.
Malviya went on to lie deliberately that if electrification of villages had continued at UPA’s pace, it would have taken “18 years for all Indian villages to be electrified.”
UPA was electrifying villages at the rate of ~ 1000 per year. At their pace, it would have taken another 18 years for all Indian villages to be electrified, leave alone every home. Prime Minister Narendra Modi electrified 18,374 villages in just 4 years! #PoweringIndia
— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) July 19, 2018
The data reveals quite the opposite. Between 2005-2014, the Manmohan Singh government carried out electrification at the rate of almost 10,000 villages per year. The BJP’s pac, on the other hand, has been roughly around 5,000 villages a year – half of the Congress government’s. The BJP would have taken 25.8 years to electrify all villages.
The BJP taking complete credit of 100 percent electrification of villages is nothing short of a lie aimed at misleading people, like most the party’s empty claims about development.