Narayanan Kani flicked on the single switch hanging by the side of a pole, which holds up his hut. A point of white light, slightly bigger than the tip of a ball-point pen, came alive. This is the only electricity that he and his wife Maathi Kanikkarathi has experienced within their hut till now, thanks to a solar panel that they received from the government 15 years ago.
Situated in the tribal settlement of Pattampara, deep inside the Agasthyarkoodam forest ranges near Thiruvananthapuram, Narayanan’s hut, the only one in half-a-kilometre radius, is frequented by elephants and other occupants of the wild. “The dogs can smell them from far away and they warn us. This is why all the houses in these hills have a lot of dogs. This small light too does not work sometimes. We are used to living in the dark. But, we do not want to move elsewhere as all our ancestors have lived here for centuries,” he says.
It is a cloudy morning, early in May. A group of officials from the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) are at his doorstep. Among them is Assistant Executive Engineer Kuttappan Kani, a member of the Kani tribe, who is the constituency’s coordinator for the Kerala government’s Total Electrification project. “Do you know why we have come?” he asks. Narayanan Kani smiles and says – “Yes. Current (power). Hope it comes soon.”
All across the remote corners of the State, teams like those of Kuttappan Kani’s have fanned out over the past few months, in search of houses where electricity is yet to make its way. They are all working towards realisation of a dream, which no other State has yet achieved – to take electricity to every single household in the State, however remote they may be.
No steady power
“As per the Central government’s norms, a village is considered fully electrified if power reaches the village’s border and at least 10% of households there are electrified. By those standards, Kerala had achieved total electrification long ago. But now we are working in a much more micro-level, to ensure that every household in the State is electrified. Most of these houses have had solar panels for more than a decade, but no steady power supply,” says Mohammed Kasim, executive engineer.
The process to achieve this dream was set in motion as soon as the Left Democratic Front (LDF) took charge last year. Governor P. Sasthasivam, in his address to the Assembly on June 24, had declared that the government is committed to providing power for all, at affordable cost and that all households in the State will be electrified by 2017. At the State Power Ministers’ conference held in Goa in the same month, the State had communicated this commitment to the Centre.
A month later, a State-level meeting of the Chief Minister, Electricity Minister and top KSEB officials was held to work out the strategy for attaining the goal of total electrification. The biggest challenge for the KSEB at that point of time was to identify the houses which are off the grid. With the available human resource in its hand, it was not possible for the KSEB to ensure that every house is taken into account. Implementation committees were thus formed at the electrical section level in each panchayat and municipality, with panchayat members and other people’s representatives, who had a clear picture of the terrain and the people.
“Soon after the government announced the plan, many came forward and applied, but that was not enough. We had to make sure that we did not leave anyone. The local section officers, along with the panchayat members, earnestly took up this task, and here we are,” says Kasim. It was no easy job though as, on the face of it, the process involved was a mere listing of the houses that had no power supply and proceeding to the next. At several houses, they had to sit down and convince the residents to take the connection. Like at Marthandan Kani’s hut at Kunnatheri in the Agasthyarkoodam forests, where seven members of the family live in a one-room house.
Some opposition
“We elders go for work inside the forests during daytime. Only the children will be here. It will be dangerous if you place all these electrical connections inside the hut. There is also not much space in here,” he tells the KSEB officials, who take quite some time to explain to him how everything will be safely insulated. Then they seek his help to carry the panels, required for huts without solid walls, all the way from the nearest road, about 3 km away. But this work of convincing does not always pay dividends. There are a few who are vehemently opposed to the idea of their houses being electrified. For instance, in the remote settlement of Anakkal in the same forest ranges, some residents said they would violently oppose any attempt to bring power.
“Only three or four people are against this in the Anakkal settlement. Their stand is that they don’t want anything from the government. They say they are happy to live as they are now. But due to them, others who want it there are being denied the opportunity to have power supply. We have to get someone close to them to negotiate. If nothing works out, we will take the connection till just outside the settlement, so that they can get it easily later, in case they feel the need for it,” says Kuttappan Kani.
On the way back, he meets the panchayat president, who was there for a meeting at the community centre, to tell him about the situation. He assures him that he will personally try to convince the naysayers.
After several rounds of data collection and scrutiny of all applications, it was revealed that 1,51,531 houses remained to be electrified in the State.
The State government and the KSEB had taken some major decisions to ensure that no one was left out. In September 2016, the government had issued an order to amend the Kerala Electricity Supply Code Regulations, 2014 to permit grant of electricity connections to residential structures of plinth area of 100 sq.m and less without proof of ownership or legal occupancy certificate from the local body, subject to the condition that electricity connection shall not be considered as proof of legality of the structure or the ownership or possession.
This came as a blessing for those who have been unable to obtain door numbers from the local bodies as there are issues regarding the legality of their holdings. The application process was also simplified, by reducing the number of required documents from seven to just two. The initial security deposit from domestic applicants under BPL (below the poverty line) category was also not insisted if the connected load is not more than 1kilowatt. It was at this stage that the KSEB faced the next big challenge.
Around 42,000 houses that they had identified as having no power connection did not have any internal wiring. KSEB’s responsibility ends at the last electric pole outside a house. Internal wiring is the responsibility of the consumer. But the owners of these houses, most of them belonging to BPL families, could not afford to do so. The KSEB had to find other ways to mobilise funds.
A breakthrough became possible when various employees’ and officers’ unions of the KSEB organised a fund collection drive among their members and pitched in with their contributions to wire the unwired houses.
The Rural Electrification Corporation, the Power Finance Corporation, the Kerala Power Finance Corporation and various NGOs also came up with contributions for the purpose with their corporate social responsibility funds.
Interiors
Many of the settlements yet to get power were situated in the interiors. Cables, underground in most places, had to be laid for several kilometres to get power to such settlements. The KSEB reached out to the SC/ST Development Department for financial support, which agreed to cover 75% of the cost of laying cables in the SC/ST colonies. To settlements like Societykudi in Edamalakkudy, underground cables for a distance of as many as 13 km had to be laid. In most places, this was achieved with minimal cutting down of trees.
Funds from the Central government’s Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana were used in some places.
Except for a handful, all the MLAs also contributed considerably from their funds for the project. In forests where overhead lines were installed, Aerial Bundled Cable (ABC), which costs 30% more than the normal overhead lines, was used, due to its relative immunity to short circuits caused by wind or falling branches.
Transportation of the electric poles and other equipment was a huge challenge in places like the Agasthyarkoodam forests, where the labourers had to walk all the way up the steep hills carrying them for several kms. Wooden poles were used here due to the lesser weight. “Compared to the actual work of laying lines and putting up poles, carrying these poles is what tired us out,” says Ramesan, one of the workers at the Pattampara settlement.
But, even after all this effort, there were a few areas in Idukki, Palakkad and Wayanad districts where KSEB faced major practical difficulties, logistically and financially, in extending the grid. For the handful of houses in such areas, ANERT and the Energy Management Centre are providing new solar panels. At a few other places, especially in Rose Mala in Kollam district, there have also been issues relating to forest clearances and property crossing.
For this last lap of electrification, over the past one year, the KSEB had to spend close to ₹175 crore. KSEB officials admit that all the work might not be over by the time Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan makes the total electrification declaration at Kozhikode on May 29, but it will not take more than a month or two after that for lights to shine from every household in the State.
