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Mera Gaon, Mera Desh

I visit my village, a little nondescript village, 30 miles south west of Bhagalpur town in Bihar, once in a year, preferably during the winters. This is the time of the year when I spend my holidays without worrying about electricity and power failures. I was following this travel manual for last fifteen years. But this year, I had to visit my village during the height of summers for some pressing family reasons.I was happy to visit my birth place where I was born 35 years back. After all this was the place where I grew up, got my primary and secondary education. I was destined to spend at least 10 days in village aware of this fact that there will be no fans, no coolers, no ACs and no fridge.

Perhaps that was not an issue for me till I was a child. But after spending good 15 years in Gujarat, Punjab and Delhi, it was disheartening and discomforting to live in dark. There was electricity supply 50 years back in my adjoining villages. 1,000 volt power cable used to pass just half a kilometer away from my ancestral house. A dedicated power supply came to our village in 1987 when Congress used to rule Bihar. There was diwali like scene in my village and it could have been spotted from 10 kilometres away.

But those “powerful” days did not last long. There was major electricity cables theft across the neighbouring villages and my village again slumped into darkness for many years. Electricity did not return in many parts of Bihar like my village and no attempts were made to stop cable theft across Bihar. Selling of electricity cable became rampant. After all it was a quick way to earn few hundreds little realizing that this greed will push the state in an age of darkness.

My village sleeps early is not a secret. My two years old daughter Palki refuses to open her eyes after sunset and my 70 year old father sleeps after 7 pm. Entire village becomes silent around 8pm. I literally spend my nights viewing stars from my roof top. I don’t mind watching stars but my little daughter fears darkness as most of the children of her age do. She never lived in darkness in Chandigarh where she was born two years back. Power supply in Chandigarh is better that any other Indian cities.During former Chief minister Laloo Yadav’s Raj nobody thought about power and roads. Those 15 years were miserable. No development work took place. After Nitish Kumar government assumed power in Patna roads got a facelift in the state on a big scale. But electricity remained a far cry for many villages.Summer was at its peak, heat was taking its toll on human life and animals. Only solace was mango orchard around our house, which was planted by my grand father around 1950. But cool breeze was missing. Hand fans were very handy to get respite from the scorching heat. This is the story of half of my village, the rajput tola (part of the village where only rajput lives).

The other half of my village does not live in darkness. The CFL bulbs dot the village. After 6 pm, gates, tree tops and the chaupals are well lit. The other part of the village belongs to kumhars (potters) and beldars (who dig soil). They have been declared most backward caste by the Bihar government. The most backward part of my village is surprisingly not that backward. Without electricity supply, they have developed their own power station. Pumping set used for irrigating water is being used as power generator. 10 horse power machine supplies electricity to 90 households. Prahlad Pandit, 60, says, “It was started on May 8 this year and the project is highly talked about. Poor people of this village have chased darkness without any government help.“The power tariff is not costly. For one CFL bulb, we charge 1.5 litres of kerosene oil, for 2 CFL, two litres of kerosene oil and for three CFL bulbs three litres of kerosene oil. If one doesn’t have kerosene oil, we charge Rs 45 for one bulb and Rs 60 for two bulbs,” says Prahlad Pandit.Kerosene oil is supplied to BPL families in Bihar on a subsidized rate of Rs 10/letre. But everybody prefers to works under milky lights of CFL.It all started with the effort of two non metric boys, Gajanan and Pankaj Kumar who work part time as mechanics. We saw pumping sets doubling up as generator in many villages like Manihari, Runji and Laldih in Jharkhand’s Godda district. I attached a cable from the pumping set and connected around 100 households. We checked it and it worked perfectly alright, say the duo. Gajanan and Pankaj are like chief engineers and Bipin, Bubloo and Shankar act as watchdogs. Now more and more people are approaching them to give them power.“Over the years, we worked very hard to get electricity but it did not come. Now it provides us power without fail, says kishan Pandit, a panchayat member.

The CFL bulbs have given major fillip to the way children used to study here. Power supply between 6 pm to 10 pm is mostly availed by the poor children. Who could have preferred to sleep than studying under lantern’s light. (Lantern is called laltain in Bihar. These omnipresent Laltain is the election symbol of the Rashtriya Janta Dal, which ruled bihar for 15 years and led the state into the era of darkness.)Under 10 watt CFL light 10-20 students can read and write in a better way. On many village corners these groups are visible engrossed in their books. Village elders watch them studying and take pride in stating that these children will one day change their fate for better. If electricity fails in Delhi, citizens and the leaders make a hue and cry. We also need power supply; we are also citizens of India. How long Bihar will be discriminated. A group of villager says in unison that they have found a way out from the state of misery they were in. Bihar: Where is power? Bihar practically produces no electricity, except 60-8- MW from the Baruani Thermal power plant. Against the peak need of 1500-1800 MW of power, Bihar gets only 600 MW of power from different grids. The electricity requirement for capital Patna city is about 300 MW. The NTPC plant in Kahalgaon produces around 70 MW of electricity, but its costly (RS 10/unit at peak hours). The state of rural electrification scenario is dismal in Bihar, only 50 percent the villages have got power connection against the national average of 84 per cent. Of the total number of 38,475 villages, only 19,281 villages are electrified and some of them partially. Surprisingly, more than 13000 villages were de-electrified again because of theft of electric cables.“When different development projects get started, the energy needs will become very difficult to meet, said Saibal Gupta, Patna based economist. Going by the pace of work in Bihar on rural electrification front, it’s very unlikely that villages here will see light in coming 5-10 years. Puncturing the development agenda of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who is lauded as vikas purush in state, former central minister and Member of Parliament from Banka Digvijay Singh said that not a single MW of power has been added to state’s kitty. Under Rajeev Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran scheme, the Centre has awarded an amount of Rs 2324 crores to Bihar, which will bring alive 43 small projects in the state, disclosed Bharat Singh Solanki, minister of state for power before the Rajya Sabha.There are atleast 14 power plants lined up in Bihar, once they are set up, state would become a power surplus state, with an addition capacity of 12,130 MW.