Hope to dispel the darkness

March 15: Rajen Boro will no longer have to depend on kerosene to light up his home when dusk falls.

Boro, a resident of Kundalbari village in Udalguri district, had always feared that the kerosene may run out in his home, resulting in his children not doing their homework and the family having to spend the night in darkness.

With no electricity in the village, Boro, along with fellow villagers and others living on the Indo-Bhutan border in Udalguri district, had to depend on kerosene to light up their homes .

But with the Assam State Electricity Board (ASEB) gearing up to provide electricity in the villages, the residents are ecstatic.

The ASEB has embarked upon an ambitious project to provide electricity to 21,905 villages under the Rajiv Gandhi Vidyutikaran Yojana. One of the highlights of the project is to provide free electricity connection to nearly 10 lakh consumers below the poverty line.

The programme aims at a qualitative transformation of the rural electricity infrastructure and envisages an end to discrimination between urban and rural areas in respect to hours of supply.

As part of this project, the rural electrification work in undivided Darrang district was inaugurated recently at Amjuli village on the Indo-Bhutan border in Udalguri by the Assam minister for public health engineering, Rihon Daimari.

Speaking on the occasion, the minister said the Assam government was working for the development of all villages in the state and as electricity was a key ingredient of development, electrification of villages was being done in a phased manner.

He added that nearly 1,208 villages in undivided Darrang district would be provided electricity under this project and 5,400 BPL consumers would be provided free electricity connections. He also urged the villagers to help the ASEB to counter power theft.

The assistant chief engineer of the ASEB, Kalyan Sarma, said all the villages along the Indo-Bhutan border would be provided with electricity within this year.

“We have to depend on lantern light to study and often we cannot stay up late because of scarcity of kerosene. Now with the promise of electricity, we hope that we can study till late at night,” said Mitinga Basumatary, a young student.