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When the lights stayed on

Meena Menon

ONE EVENING, two years ago, Bhimrao Baburao Pawar, a lineman with the then Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB), faced the wrath of school children who stopped his vehicle and deflated its tyres. The students were upset that there was erratic power supply in their village of Javle Kadlag in Sangamner taluk of Ahmednagar district.

"I was upset with this and decided to call a meeting of the entire village along with about 85 school children," recalls Mr. Pawar. "The children complained that I had decided that they should not study and become successful persons by cutting off power supply to the village," he says. Maharashtra has been reeling under a power shortage; even today, in many parts of the State the load-shedding is between eight and 12 hours.

Mr. Pawar then asked all those present if they had legal light connections and it was not surprising that most did not have meters. There are 980 houses in that village and only 230 connections; the rest tapped electricity illegally. Mr. Pawar then made some quick decisions. He exhorted the villagers to stop these illegal connections and regularise their meters. The village then started getting more power as they put restrictions on when power should be used. At first, the villagers were worried if they could do it but soon they became active in stopping power thefts. All the 92 villages in Sangamner taluka are part of the scheme today.

On December 16, 2004, this power-saving scheme involving people was officially launched in the village as the Akshaya Prakash scheme. Today, it has become popular in the rich agricultural region of Nashik zone where about 3,300 MW is consumed daily, the highest in the State.

According to Sanjay Bhatia, managing director, Mahavitaran or the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited, which now oversees the scheme following the trifurcation of the MSEB, only 80 to 100 villages were part of the scheme last June. Today there are about 2,500. As a result, the State's power shortfall of 4,500 MW has come down by 500 MW, according to a company spokesperson. Many of the villages involved in the scheme now enjoy 23 hours of power supply.

Last week at Thingoda village, 80 km from Nashik, a function was held to mark the scheme's success. Slogans were painted on walls and banners proclaiming the need to save power lined the road to Thingoda. In a single day, about 195 villages from Nashik, Ahmednagar, and Dhule districts joined the scheme, taking the total number of villages in the Nashik zone to 1,241.

At the site of the function, attended by top MSEB and Mahavitaran officials, thousands of confiscated electric cooking stoves and large drums used to heat water were displayed. About one lakh stoves and heaters were recovered from Nashik zone alone. Says Usha Bachchav, sarpanch of the nearby Deola village which implemented the scheme on January 1, 2005: "The students said that they did not want heaters and it was they who took out a campaign to rid houses of them. We took tractors to each house and collected all the heaters." Now, between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. and again from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. they regulate the use of power. Children can study and the supply is better with fewer transformer burnouts. People are fined anything from Rs.5,000 to Rs.10,000 for stealing power.

Big improvement

Kishore Pardeshi, a farmer from Thingoda, said that earlier they had to work at night in their fields and suffer snakebites. "We did not get labourers to work as power was on only at night,"' he said. Crops suffered and farmers sustained crores of rupees in losses. After joining the scheme, things have improved, he said.

Under the Akshaya Prakash scheme, villagers have to reduce power consumption to 20 per cent of the normal load and switch off three-phase agricultural pumps and flour mills during certain periods. All illegal connections have to be regularised by installing meters and the village has to have a Dakshata Samiti or a monitoring committee to oversee that there are no thefts. Agricultural pumps have to be fitted with capacitors to minimise power losses.

According to Devidas Pawar, a Shetkari Sanghatana leader from Kalwan taluka in Nashik district, heavy fines have been imposed on people stealing power and even officials who allow this have not been spared. At 5 p.m. every evening, lights are switched off for an hour as a warning. Nashik zone tops the list under the scheme while Kolhapur has 682 villages, Kalyan 455, Akola 55, Nagpur 50, and Latur 32. Ironically, last April, Mr. Pawar had led a group of angry villagers who attacked the local offices of the power distribution company because they were fed up with power cuts. Since then, there has been a sea change. "The people who once attacked us, are now welcoming us into the villages," remarked a company official.

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