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NAINITAL: Uttarakhand Power Corporation conducted a survey, results of which were declared only last month, and found that of four districts in Kumaon division, over 97,000 homes were yet to get electricity connections.

Following it, the department approached the Centre and Rs 5 crore has been released under the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana — “Saubhagya” to light the homes of below poverty line families free of cost and a nominal Rs 500 will be charged from the above poverty line families in the four districts.

Prakash Chandra Pande, chief engineer of the corporation, said, “Centre has released Rs 5 crore and work will be started in the four districts within two-three weeks. We have started the tendering process and bids have been invited.”

The survey identified a total 97,406 homes without power connection in Nainital (36,666), Almora (23,086), Udham Singh Nagar (20,508) and Bageshwar (17,146) districts of the Kumaon division of the hill state.

Pande added, “Our aim is to provide hassle free power supply to more than 8.5 lakh consumers. I will be personally looking into the matters related to power outage, overloading, power theft and many other issues and resolve them at the earliest.”

Power department officials, however, said that survey of Champawat and Pithoragarh districts is continuing and more houses without electricity would be identified from these two districts.

Govind Singh, 32, a resident of Thapliyalkheda village in Champawat district, said, “Forget electricity, we don’t even have roads and bridges. We have been isolated from rest of the world. Only two people from our village have government jobs.”

Thapliyalkheda is around 170 km from state’s judicial capital Nainital and has no electricity, no road connectivity and its residents got voting rights only in 1998. Adding to the irony, this village is only 9 km from Tanakpur, which houses a power plant on Sharda river.

Manini Arya, 42, a resident of Nainital district and has his family listed in the BPL category, said, “Even if they are giving us free electricity connections after so many years, who is going to pay the electricity bills for the years to come?”

Echoing similar concerns, Girish Chander, a resident of Almora district, said, “We don’t know what it means like having electricity connections at our homes. We have been living like this for years and have been ignored forever.”

Uttarakhand has many villages with no electricity connections. Thousands of rural residents still depend on kerosene for lighting their homes. A difficult hilly terrain poses further challenges for distribution of electricity and transportation of fuel. People here also resort to fossil fuel/forest wood even at the cost of high pollution, fire hazards and deforestation.

