CAG report exposes mismatch between Govt’s electrification claims and scheme objectives
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A performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana and the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana has found wide discrepancies between the declared objectives of the two flagship schemes and the Modi government’s claim of having achieved 100 per cent rural electrification.
As targets were revised downwards, data gaps persisted and states continued to report unelectrified households even after the deadline for completion had passed, according to a report published in The Wire.
The CAG report, which was tabled in Parliament during the winter session, recorded that the SAUBHAGYA scheme had initially estimated that 300 lakh unelectrified households would be covered, although this number was later reduced on the scheme dashboard to 248.48 lakh.
After that, the government declared that the target had been fully achieved by March 2019 by reporting the electrification of 262.84 lakh households, a figure that exceeded the revised estimate but not the original guideline target.
The auditors found that this downward revision was not supported by any transparent reassessment exercise, and that seven states had reported 19.10 lakh unelectrified households as of 31 March 2019, which meant that the audit could not verify the genuineness of the claim that universal household electrification had been achieved.
While the Ministry of Power told the CAG that household electrification was a “dynamic process” and that new unelectrified households coming up on a day-to-day basis were not covered under SAUBHAGYA because the scheme had a fixed implementation period.
But the audit pointed out that such an interpretation effectively allowed the government to meet its targets by redefining the denominator rather than by achieving saturation on the ground.
Of the 262.84 lakh households said to have been electrified by March 2019, only 151.60 lakh were actually connected under SAUBHAGYA, while 73.60 lakh were covered under DDUGJY and allied rural electrification projects and another 36.90 lakh under state schemes, which were all later presented together as SAUBHAGYA achievements under what the ministry described as a co-created approach with the states.
Even within this aggregated figure, the CAG found a gap of 2.96 lakh households for which no household-wise details were available, a discrepancy that the ministry attributed to incorrect or missing village census codes uploaded by some states in the final phase of implementation.
States themselves repeatedly flagged continuing gaps, as seven states, including Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Manipur, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, sought and were granted extensions up to March 2020.
Despite these extensions, 11.76 lakh unelectrified households in eight states were again sanctioned for electrification under DDUGJY, of which only 4.31 lakh had been connected by December 2023, which underlined that the objective of universal electrification remained unmet years after the original deadline.
The audit also flagged duplicate claims in two states, where 16,728 households received connections under both DDUGJY and SAUBHAGYA, resulting in double payments of Rs 7.53 crore to distribution companies, while it further found that feeder separation, a core objective of DDUGJY, had fallen far short of the levels approved by the Cabinet.