{"id":307771,"date":"2019-12-30T11:57:01","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T06:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/?p=307771"},"modified":"2019-12-30T11:57:08","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T06:27:08","slug":"opinion-electricity-key-to-a-nations-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/opinion-electricity-key-to-a-nations-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Electricity key to a nation\u2019s development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1980s, in the western Odisha town of Balangir, where I grew up, less than 10% households in the district (by the same name) had electricity access. Even as I started working as a consultant in Odisha\u2019s power sector reform project in the 1990s, less than 30% households were electrified in the eastern Indian states of Bihar, Assam, West Bengal and Odisha.<\/p>\n<p>So, when Mint first reported this seemingly innocuous news on 28 April 2018, I was overwhelmed. \u201cAll Indian villages will now have access to electricity. The last village to be brought on the national power grid was Leisang village of Manipur at 5.30pm today,&#8221; said the news report.<\/p>\n<p>A seminal moment in the journey of independent India, the significance of this achievement was not lost on anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the 1980s, in the western Odisha town of Balangir, where I grew up, less than 10% households in the district (by the same name) had electricity access. Even as I started working as a consultant in Odisha\u2019s power sector reform project in the 1990s, less than 30% households were electrified in the eastern Indian states of Bihar, Assam, West Bengal and Odisha. So, when Mint first reported this seemingly innocuous news on 28 April 2018, I was overwhelmed. \u201cAll Indian villages will now have access to electricity. The last village to be brought on the national power grid was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[139,130,237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-mint","category-newspapers","category-power-live-mint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}