Powerless in UP

On a cool February afternoon, father-of-the-bride Mukesh Sharma was busy supervising the wedding preparations. In one of the wider lanes of Mohd Sadikpur village, around 200km from Delhi, a pandal was being set up. An ornate street light was being assembled as the centrepiece. Fresh jalebis and gulab jamuns waited in heaps, covered in chashni. A DJ had been booked. Mukesh had spared no expense for his daughter Ritu’s wedding — ₹30,000 for lights, sounds and decoration, and a 7.5HP generator to power it all.

As the day wore on, a crowd huddled around the generator. Some had brought their mobile phones, a few students lugged their laptops, and others carried extension cords. When the festivities pick up later that evening, the generator will chug to life and so will their electronic appliances. They would dance under lights to the latest Bollywood numbers and charge their phones — from the same source. For the people of Mohd Sadikpur village, occasions like these were a blessing in disguise. For a few hours, they would have uninterrupted power supply at no cost.

In 1951, newly Independent India held its first general election. Sadikpur village in Moradabad was electrified in the early ’50s, when a lone electric pole was erected here, but the waves of current never reached its homes.

Thirty crore people — nearly a quarter of 121 crore people — and 8 crore households in India live without access to electricity. However, according to Census 2011, 94.6 per cent of the country’s villages are electrified, leaving 32,227 villages completely in the dark. Under the latest plan of the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY, formerly known as Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana), 98 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s 28,311 ‘un-electrified’ villages have been electrified, and intensive electrification has been carried out in more than 3,000 villages. While these are impressive figures, in reality nearly two-third of UP’s 20 crore people still have no regular access to power.

The 2012 blackout, which affected 68 crore people across 18 states, made little difference in UP, where nearly 40 per cent of the population was already living in the dark. In rural electrification schemes, a village is said to be electrified if 10 per cent of all households, public spaces such as schools, health centres and panchayat offices have access to electricity. But for many villages, like Mohd Sadikpur, electrification simply means a tangled web of power transmission lines that never hum with electricity.

Every year, especially around Diwali, August 15 or January 26, villages that have just received electricity and those that remain in the dark make news. In November last year, 20km from Lucknow, Chibaukhera village lit up with bulbs and television sets for the very first time while its neighbour Sheetal Khera endured yet another dark Diwali. Just last week, Chakshyam village, Allahabad district got electricity after its transformer had stopped working 14 years ago. Imlak village in Moradabad district has a similar story to tell — electricity coursed through its homes for a few years before being severed. The villages have now lived for 20 years without power. Sadikpur residents too share the same fate; electricity travels through wires around them but not a unit of current reaches them.

Power and weddings

A few doors down from Mukesh Sharma’s household, Arjun Singh is getting ready for his wedding. A gangly 24-year-old, Arjun is smeared with turmeric as friends and family sit in the courtyard discussing his nuptials. “Mukesh is lucky his daughter is getting married. She will move to a village with power. Arjun’s bride will have no such luck,” says Hari Om, one of the friends in attendance. “It’s easier in our village to get daughters married off,” he explains. For many bachelors in Sadikpur, the power-less status of the village is proving to be their undoing. Bachelors are to be found in plenty, but few brides are willing to marry into the village. If in Haryana, brides are in short supply because of the adverse sex ratio and prevalence of female foeticide, in Sadikpur the main problem appears to be the lack of electricity. “Parents don’t want to send their daughters to these villages. Our bachelors are finding it tough to secure alliances,” says Hari.

In most ‘dark’ villages across UP, wedding gifts have presented a peculiar problem. Brides arrived in droves, laden with typical ‘dowry gifts’ — spanking new television sets, fans, refrigerators, mixers and grinders. But in these villages, electrical appliances have served little purpose. Televisions and fans are stowed behind locked doors, their wrapping intact and smothered by layers of dust. Mixers and grinders have been repurposed as buckets and mugs. Refrigerators have been fashioned into shelves and safes. In Sadikpur, the problem is only getting worse. “Ninety per cent of our households have TVs, 70 per cent have fans, 20 per cent have refrigerators, but we can’t use any of them,” says Vijay Singh, manager of a private school in the village. He also remarks that increasingly, wives are abandoning husbands, and families their village in search of brighter pastures. While there are no statistics to corroborate this, Vijay confidently puts the figure at 15-20 per cent.

Arjun, however, is luckier than most men in Sadikpur. He is one of the first grooms in the village to convince the bride’s parents to gift his family a generator and not a television. With days to go for his wedding, the Hercules Gold Generator set occupies pride of place at the entrance of his home. Shiny and sealed in plastic, Hercules has already become popular with neighbours. At his home, we sit sipping chai, made with milk from his dairy. His business is struggling, he says, because of storage issues. “Here we don’t even eat ice-creams or paneer,” he adds. Earlier, he had even set up a mobile shop in the nearby town of Narauli. “It didn’t work out. I had to cycle 30km every day, which was tough. And I’d like to run my business in my own village.”

Missing from plans

Ahead of the 2014 general elections, while campaigning, UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had vowed that “we will not allow Modi to turn UP into another Gujarat.” Days later at the Gorakhpur rally, Narendra Modi shot back, “Do you know what turning UP into Gujarat means? It means providing 24x7 electricity in every village.” According to rating agencies ICRA and Credit Analysis and Research (CARE), the four discoms in Gujarat are the country’s best while the five UP discoms are the worst. UP, where forced power holidays are all too common, has been facing an acute shortage of power for years. While the UP government has ordered a complete overhaul of the power sector before the onset of summer, Sadikpur village appears to be missing from its plans. Currently, the village is not even listed under the DDUGJY’s plan for rural electrification.

Sadikpur has also been unlucky in its protests. Almost a decade ago, neighbouring village Dhamawali refused to cooperate with health officials for the polio immunisation programme. The protests lasted eight days, after which electricity arrived at the village. Sadikpur has borrowed the form of resistance, boycotting polio programmes every year, but access to power still eludes it. The village also missed ‘being adopted’ last year on account of vote bank politics (not enough members from a particular community).

“Imagine what your life would be like without electricity,” says Vijay. “People always ask us what it is like to live here, but you tell us what it is to have power.” Uninterrupted power in Sadikpur village would mean breathing easily under the ghoonghat, not running to the fields to charge mobiles by the tractor, and not carrying out vaccination programmes by kerosene lamp light.

For Vijay and his pupils, access to electricity will mean longer hours at school, the possibility of homework, better eyesight and a decrease in the dropout rate. “I have noticed that more and more students are failing before Class V even,” says Vijay. Driver Tarachand can go back to his original occupation of being an electrician. Arjun might have better luck with his dairy. Sanjay Singh and his family will not have to move to Punjab.

For 26-year-old farmer Gaurav Sharma, access to electricity will mean peace in the household. His wife Kumkum regularly threatens to leave. His mother is forever upset with the bahu. His children are always late to school. “How can one live like this,” asks Kumkum. “I have to warm up the iron box on the small cylinder to press the school uniforms, which makes the children late. If I had known Sadikpur is a dark village, I wouldn’t have come.” Kumkum’s sisters, who are married into more prosperous, that is, better-lit towns and villages, gifted her with a refrigerator and two Toofan fans. “I can’t speak to them now. We have quarrelled. And I can’t use their gifts,” complains Kumkum.

For now, Gaurav spends a portion of his agricultural income for a few hours of peace and electricity, much to his mother’s annoyance. A fairly large landowner, his spacious home functions as a micro-grid for most of the neighbourhood. For a couple of hours every day, the motor of his tractor parked in the yard provides power to run all the gadgets in the house and locality. Three dozen bulbs glow, nearly 30 mobiles are put on charge, the television comes on, the pump starts up and the atta chakki comes to life. He has also invested in jugaad devices like the battery-operated and handheld glow-in-the-dark device to light the way for women and children going to the toilet. His children have come up with their own invention — a palm-sized, battery-operated cardboard-blade personal fan for the summers.

The people of Sadikpur are naturally distrustful of politicians, the local administration and media. Nevertheless, they’ve made plans for the day electricity finally arrives in their village. Vijay declares that households will happily take connections and pay for supply. Tarachand, who the villagers claim is an expert with wires, will set up his electrical shop. Arjun will open a mobile store. Others will start internet cafes, computer stores and even auto repair shops. Gaurav’s mother’s provision store will have light for customers to scrutinise their purchases. Markers of modernity have already arrived in the village in the form of smartphones and laptops (of the Akhilesh Yadav scheme), education and aspirations. “Development will come to Sadikpur,” says Vijay, his hope burning brighter than the bulbs overhead.

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