UP lines up Rs 388 crore to light up Ambedkar villages

The Uttar Pradesh government has planned electrification of Ambedkar villages in the current fiscal at an outlay of Rs 388 crore.

A total of 3,534 Ambedkar villages will be electrified in the state in Phase III, UP Power Corporation Limited chairman and managing director Navneet Sehgal said.

The third phase would cover Meerut, Saharanpur, Moradabad, Bareilly, Agra, Aligarh, Jhansi, Chitrakoot, Allahabad, Kanpur, Varanasi, Vindhyachal, Lucknow, Gorakhpur, Basti, Devipatan, Azamgarh and Ferozabad divisions.

Besides, under the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana, the state government is electrifying 68,000 villages in UP. “So far, almost 80 per cent of the work has been completed and we hope to electrify the rest of the villages by June 30 this year,” Sehgal said.

The state government is working on an ambitious plan to ramp up power availability in the state by 25,000 Mw in the next Twelfth Five Year Plan.

Sehgal said this would be made possible by setting up new power plants in public and private sectors and buying power from all possible sources in the country.

Under the public-private partnership model, the state government will set up new power plants at Sonebhadra (2,000 Mw), Lalitpur (4,000), Etah (2,000) and Bulandshahr (2,000). Under the state sector, 5,000 Mw would be generated at the proposed Anpara E.