By MKPE ABANG
Have you ever heard of the name Piyush Goyal? I bet not a name many Nigerians have. But that is one man that if we could bring to Nigeria on sabbatical, many of our electricity woes may jump out the window.
Piyush Goyal is the Minister of Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy. Before going further into the discussion it is instructive to take note of the wording of his portfolio: power, coal, and new & renewable energy. Take careful note that everything about his portfolio is energy; but more importantly, it shows how wide and expanded the sector is.
Now, here is why Nigeria needs urgently to invite Piyush Goya to come and spend 12 months on sabbatical in ‘Africa’s largest economy’ of empty boasting:
In 2015, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi set for itself an ambitious plan: to electrify all villages in the country by March 2017. It is 12 months to that deadline; and, by all indications, the government is looking good to keeping its promise.
And, you wonder why this is important or relevant to Nigeria.
India occupies 2.4 per cent of the world’s land area but holds over 17.5 per cent of the world’s population with 1.252 billion people as of 2013, out of which 72.2 per cent are said to live in about 640,000 villages, while the remaining 27.8 per cent live in more than 5,100 towns and over 380 urban agglomerations.
India is currently the second most populous country in the world, with over 1.277 billion people (2015), more than a sixth of the world’s population. Already containing 17.5% of the world’s population, India is threatening already to overtake China as the world’s most populous country. It is projected that by 2022, India will surpass China in population, with the Indian population reaching 1.6 billion by 2050.
India is also not a mono-ethnic country. it has more than two thousand ethnic groups, and every major religion is represented, as are four major families of languages (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages) as well as two language isolates (the Nihali language spoken in parts of Maharashtra and the Burushaski language spoken in parts of Jammu and Kashmir).
So by all standards, India has about more of the complexities that Nigeria has: a population over six times that of Nigeria; it has a multiplicity of ethnicities; it was also colonised by the chief colonialist of the world, Britain, and gained independence on August 15, 1947; it has villages in their hundreds of thousands. Yet, India launched a project: to electrify all the villages by March 2017! It is a project worth emulating; now you see the reason why we need to invite the minister in charge of their project to come to Nigeria on sabbatical!
We cannot be sure how many villages Nigeria has; but we are told Nigeria has 170 million people only! Of course, only, when you compare with India’s population. Nigeria has on record 774 local governments (not villages); and, as at the last count, not all the headquarters of those local governments are electrified, just like not all of them have access road for vehicles to ply.
It will be wrong to say or think that everything in India is working. But a man who sets himself a target and goes about working to achieve it, has greater chances of success than one who only talks about what he could have done but for this and that challenge – challenges that are available as obstacles to everyone else.
I should hasten to point out something that actually caught my attention, in this target set by the indian government; and, in fact it is what attracted me to bringing up this point for discussion. Mr Minister of Energy for India, that is Piyush Goyal, the very one I am recommending Nigeria invites on sabbatical, has stated it clearly – on behalf of the Government of Prime Minister Modi, of course – that the target to electrify all Indian villages by March 2017 must be met, insisting that the people should hold him accountable!
Just how do the people hold him accountable? An app has been developed which tracks the electrification of each and every village as the project progresses. So, citizens can actually keep track of the progress being made! And, should anyone doubt, they can verify. And the Android app was released by the government itself, so the citizens can track the progress and hold it accountable.
Says the minister: “Track in real time as we electrify every single one of our villages. Hold us accountable
And, that is the Grameen Vidyutikaran Android app, which lets anyone track the progress in the field of rural electrification in India through a real-time dashboard. Launched by Rural Electrification Corporation Limited, the app is available for Android users, while other platforms can track the progress using a web dashboard, hosted at Kyrosoft, a New Delhi-based company.
The dashboard presents the total number of un-electrified villages, and details the status of the un-electrified villages and the work in progress – whether they’ve been surveyed, or if work has yet to start
A Milestones tab displays the percentage achieved, against the number of days left, while a progress bar shows the number of villages electrified on a weekly basis.
According to statistics presented in the dashboard, Odisha, Bihar, and Assam have the highest number of un-electrified villages.
Only 78.7 per cent of India’s population has access to electricity, according to World Bank data. The centre’s Deendayal Upadhyaya Grameen Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY) aims to achieve electrification of all the un-electrified villages by 31 March 2017.
“During the last 11 months we have already electrified 6,029 un-electrified villages under our mission of energising 18,452 villages. We will complete the target by March 31, 2017, much ahead of the set deadline of May 2018,” Goyal said early this March.
Now, if that is not ambitious, tell me what else is!
Unlike Nigeria, where our first interest is getting those who are to provide electricity to first milk the people dry with unimaginably high tariffs in the face of growing darkness. Are investors who bought into the so-called distribution companies, not supposed to show financial capability, and invest heavily to make electricity available across the country first before talking tariff increase?
Not in Nigeria of today. The idea is to take money from consumers in advance, to give to the investors in order for them to invest in their companies. But when they are sharing their dividends in a few years, those whom they forced to invest in the DISCOs today, the consumers, will know nothing about it.
And you begin to wonder why despite its huge population, India is the hub or the capital of software in the world. With such an ambitious project, many more Indians will sit right in their villages and write pieces of software that will control banks, insurance, manufacturing, health and many other industries in the world even more than it is already doing.
After all, India is already the preferred destination for many in Nigeria for health tourism.
So, while our country men and women are trooping to India for medical tourism, we can at least ask Mr. Goyal to come to Nigeria for just 12 months on sabbatical – to guide us on how to electrify Nigerian local government headquarters first, then the semi-urban areas; and hopefully ultimately the villages – hoping that won’t take another century to achieve.