New Delhi: In an important milestone in the country's journey towards universal electricity access, Manipur's Leisang village became the last non-electrified inhabited village to join India's mainline supply network at 5.30pm on Saturday.

This means that all 597,464 inhabited villages in the country now have access to power, fulfilling a promise the PM had made on August 15, 2015, when he announced that all unelectrified villages would get power over the next 1,000 days. The last inhabited village to be powered through the off-grid system — isolated supply networks, mostly with solar power plants — was Pakol, also in Manipur.

While basic infrastructure such as distribution transformer and lines need to be set up in inhabited localities, including Dalit hamlets, a village is considered electrified if 10 per cent of its households and public places such as schools, panchayat office and health centre have access to electricity.

Having fulfilled that promise, the PM took to Twitter in a big way. "28th April 2018 will be remembered as a historic day in the development journey of India. Yesterday, we fulfilled a commitment due to which the lives of several Indians will be transformed forever. I am delighted that every single village of India now has access to electricity," he said in a series of tweets.

At the time of Modi's announcement in August 2015, data showed 18,452 villages without power. When work on village electrification started, another 1,275 villages were found to be without access to electricity. Some 1,200 villages are uninhabited and 35 were notified as grazing reserves.
"Village electrification means that the infrastructure to supply power has now reached certain parts of the village. The next step should be to focus on providing connection to all households and ensuring adequate power supply to these homes," former power secretary P Uma Shankar said.