On 28 April, the Indian government announced that it had electrified all 597,464 villages in the country. When one of the remotest Manipur villages got electricity, the last of the 18,452 villages which were unelectrified as of 31 March 2015 got access to power - something which most of the world and most urban parts of India take for granted. This task of village electrification was completed 12 days ahead of the 1,000-day deadline Prime Minister Narendra Modi had set. Speaking from the ramparts of the Lal Qila on Independence Day in August 2015, Modi had pledged to ensure no village was left without access to power.

Until Modi spoke about the 18,452 unelectifried villages, there was hardly any discussion on this issue, let alone the data point. But since the 28 April announcement, media and social media is abuzz with various facets of this electrification drive.

Should the Modi government celebrate this milestone as an achievement and are various data points reliable? There are a few questions and counterclaims to ponder over.

Google says India has more than 6,40,000 villages, so what’s the magic figure of 597,464 villages?

The electrification drive was conducted for all revenue villages. A revenue village is an administrative unit, which has well surveyed and hence well defined boundaries. This is a term used for census purposes. The 2011 census accounts for 597,464 revenue villages, about 4,000 more than the 2001 census. If a group of people start living in an ad hoc area, not recognised as a revenue entity, such agglomerations are informal. Perhaps, Google counts them but the census data does not.

So what about electrification of settlements which are not yet classified as revenue villages?

For all legal settlements, the household electrification drive currently being undertaken as part of the Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana (Saubhagya) programme will provide the connectivity.

Who electrified 579,012 (597,644 - 18,452 = 579,012) villages?

Various central and state governments electrified 579,012 villages between 1947 and (31 March) 2015 when the 18,452 unelectrified village data point cropped up. Most of this work was routine spread of power connections and not part of a single electrification programme. A large part of this work was also not owned by any single central or state government. The focus on village electrification started with the 13-month (Atal Behari) Vajpayee government in 1996. Since then, the efforts to electrify villages have been ramped up, including more than 1 lakh villages getting power during the two Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments.

So the Manmohan Singh government had a better per year run rate (1 lakh plus in 10 years) of electrifying villages than the Modi government (18,452 in four years)?

Sure! But this is modelling the problem wrong. Using a simple average (count of villages divided by count of years) assumes that the difficulty level in electrifying all 597,464 villages is the same. Nothing can be farther from truth.

As the electrification process started, power had to be taken to villages, which were much more accessible. With time, governments encountered various types of problem. The Shiyal Bet village in Amreli district in Gujarat was electrified by laying a 6.4-kilometre undersea cable. The Shadey village in the Zanskar subdivision of Ladakh required solar panels to be transported on rocky terrain, so that an off-grid power access had to be set up. The electrification of the Necha village of the Lower Dibang Valley district of Arunachal Pradesh required a commissioning team to carry heavy equipment on their backs over a treacherous Kumey river crossing.

If the physical constraints do not sound harsh enough, there’s another statistic - more than 7,000 villages of these 18,452 villages were situated in the Left Wing Extremism (LWE) districts. The Naxals operating in these districts are not known to be development friendly. Electrification of these villages was done at grave personal risk to the central government staff and contractors.

Essentially, the time and effort required to electrify a given number of villages in the past years is not an accurate predictor of the time and effort required to electrify yet-unelectrified villages in the future. The difficulty curve to attain 100 per cent electrification was exponential and not linear.

Anyone who has written a competitive exam involving percentiles should intuitively understand this. Getting to 95 percentile may not be difficult for a lot of people. But going from 95 to 99 percentile is another ball game altogether.

What’s to say that laying an undersea cable or crossing a treacherous river is more difficult than erecting a pole outside a state capital?

Although this should really not be a point of contention, but this question has been raised in social media.

Despite investing in the Rajiv Gandhi Gram Vidyutikaran Yojana, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-2 government started sliding on electrified villages count after 2012. The pace picked up only after Prime Minister Modi and then power minister Piyush Goyal redoubled the effort and focus on this activity. This data is shown in the graph below: