When some states were busy finding faults in the rural electrification program of the Centre, Union Minister Piyush Goyal was holding brainstorming sessions with his team at the power ministry and PSUs (including PFC and REC) on how to track and map the process of electrification in every village and household of this country.
The result of this few month long exercise was the launch of GARV II mobile App on Tuesday by Union Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal, New & Renewable Energy and Mines, Piyush Goyal.
As a result, village electrification is no longer about tracking electrification of 18,452 villages in the country.
In line with the government’s promise to provide Power To All households in the country, people from the comfort of their homes and through their mobiles can track progress on household electrification in each of the habitations of about 6 lakh villages in India using the GARV II App.
Explaining the features of the ‘GARV-II’ app, Goyal said that the data in respect of about 6 lakh villages, with more than 15 lakh habitations having 17 crore people, has been mapped for tracking progress on household electrification in each of the habitations of these villages.
This is a remarkable progress over the previous GARV App as in the earlier version of the ‘GARV’ App, launched in October 2015 for the effective and efficient monitoring of village electrification programme, the data of only 18,452 un-electrified villages had been mapped and a 12-stage milestone-based monitoring mechanism was put in place.
Goyal further said that this app is an important part of the ‘Digital India Initiative’ of Government of India and will contribute in further development of the villages.
Further, the Minister informed that the status of village-wise works sanctioned under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY) and release of funds to the Statesfor these projects has also been mapped in ‘GARV-II’ to monitor progress of works in each village.
The progress is required to be updated by the implementing agencies of the States on day to day basis.
All data would be made available in public domain to ensure transparency, enhance accountability of various stakeholders and facilitate view of near real time progress.
In order to bring more transparency, the Minister asked the Power Ministry officials to place more details regarding discoms, tenders and contracts in public domain.
For places, where internet facilities are not available, Goyal suggested to publish information regarding rural electrification projects like contractor’s name, amount sanctioned by the Government, deadline of the project etc. to be put on boards on the working sites in villages. This will help people in better monitoring of Government’s work, he added.
