New Delhi, April 29 (IANS): All villages in India have now been connected with electricity, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Sunday.
On Saturday evening, Leisang village in Manipur's Senapati district became the last village to be connected to the national power grid. As per official data, there were 18,452 villages without electricity in the country at the time of Modi's taking office in May 2014. "Electricity reached all Indian villages on Saturday," Modi said in a tweet.
"Yesterday, we fulfilled a commitment due to which the lives of several Indians will be transformed forever!," he said in another tweet.
The work of bringing power to India's nearly 6 lakh villages had been undertaken under the government's Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana. As per government data, 1,236 villages are uninhabited and 35 have been notified as grazing reserves.
The government has set the next target of providing electricity connections to over 4 crore rural and urban households by March 2019 under the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana (Saubhagya) initiative.
