Bijli ayee? (Has electricity come) Prime Minister Narendra Modi would ask during campaigning for the 2015 Bihar Assembly elections in a bid to nail his party’s then rival Nitish Kumar’s failures. Four years later, the question can be asked of Raghubar Das.
In 2016, chief minister Das promised zero power cuts in Jharkhand by December 2017. He made the same promise in the summer of May 2018, but the zero-power-cut goalpost was shifted to December 2018. Das even said that he would seek votes from people only when the state gets round-the-clock electricity.
In September this year, M.S. Dhoni’s wife Sakshi, during a visit to Ranchi, tweeted that Ranchi got power cuts ranging from “4 to 7 hours daily” and added “I hope the problem is addressed by the concerned authorities”.
