KOLKATA: The government on Monday said 258 villages across six states were electrified in the week to February 21 under its flagship rural electrification programe, the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojna.Of these vilages, 120 are in Odisha , 64 in Jharkhand , 41 in Assam , 19 in Madhya Pradesh , 8 in Rajasthan and 6 in Chhattisgarh , the power ministry said in a statement.“The government has decided to electrify the remaining 18,452 unelectrified villages by May 1, 2018,” the statement said. “The project has been taken on mission mode and strategy for electrification consists of squeezing the implementation schedule to 12 months and also dividing village electrification process in 12 stage milestones with defined timelines for monitoring.”As many as 5,537 villages have been electrified in the current fiscal, the statement said.“In order to expedite the progress further, a close monitoring is being done through Gram Vidyut Abhiyanta (GVA) and various actions are also being taken on regular basis like reviewing the progress on monthly basis during the RPM meeting, sharing of list of villages which are at the stage of under energisation with the state discom, identifying the villages where milestone progress are delayed,” the statement added.