Modi’s power formula to win over rural India

Rampara Kisana (Reuters): For Indian farmer Sompal Singh, the light bulb that flickers outside his mud hut home is a symbol of progress: the first time electricity from the grid has reached his remote village since independence in 1947. It is also a big deal for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has promised to provide electricity to every village before the end of 2018 and is trying to woo the huge rural population ahead of a key election in Uttar Pradesh state next year.

"The (electricity) supply is erratic but we are happy that there has been a start," said Singh, a 37-year-old father of three, who employs a bullock to work the fields in Rampara Kisana, six hours' drive east of New Delhi. "We feel we have not been forgotten."

As Modi approaches the halfway point of his five-year tenure, the leader of the world's biggest democracy has not had it easy. Key economic reforms are stalled, his "Make in India" push to turn the country into a manufacturing powerhouse has floundered and sizeable minority groups blame him and his party for pushing a Hindu nationalist agenda at their expense. Yet his government has made progress elsewhere, most notably in the power sector where change is reaching distressed rural communities in Uttar Pradesh who will go a long way to deciding the outcome of the 2017 ballot.

It was the prospect of tangible change that voters chose in 2014, propelling Modi to a landslide election victory won on the bold promise that "the good days are coming" for 1.3 billion people and by tapping dreams of a more modern India.

While many promises remain unrealised, power reforms and the creation of tens of millions of new bank accounts have helped Modi maintain his popularity. In a February poll for India Today magazine, 40 per cent of respondents chose him as the best candidate to be next Prime Minister, more than any other politician.

Modi is also expected to unveil a reshuffle of ministers within weeks, and underperformers could lose their jobs. Underlining the scale of his ambition, Modi has told power officials he wants to announce that every village has been electrified at his next federal budget in early 2017, 18 months ahead of the original target, a senior official told Reuters.

That would allow him to tell voters he had beaten his own target on a flagship policy.

"This government's job is to focus its energies on development, to take it (electricity) to every home, not like the erstwhile years where if the power reached ... a few homes in the village the government thought the work was over," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said in a recent interview. The Prime Minister's Office declined to comment for this article.
Modi, 65, has plenty to boast about; economic growth outstrips China's, foreign direct investment grew by a quarter in the 2015 financial year over the previous year and inflation has nearly halved since 2013. Still, recent state election defeats punctured his aura of invincibility, and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has seen ratings slip.

Key economic reforms on land and tax remain blocked in parliament, where the opposition controls the upper chamber, and two consecutive droughts hit rural India hard. The government must also find employment for around a million people joining the workforce every month, another major preoccupation for Modi and his team.

The BJP has also been accused of undermining India's traditions of religious tolerance by appealing to the Hindu majority, a shift that worries the Muslim population estimated at around 170 million people. "If growth doesn't pick up, if job creation doesn't pick up, that restlessness, that negative energy will manifest (itself) in social tensions," said Ajit Ranade, chief economist at industrial giant Aditya Birla Group. "The stakes are huge."

Results in five regional elections, four of them opposition strongholds, are due on May 19. Of those, the BJP has set its sights on winning only the northeastern state of Assam. But it is Uttar Pradesh, India's biggest electoral prize, that Modi must win in a state poll next year to sustain his hope of one day gaining full control of parliament and a second term in 2019.

That may explain why the rate of electrification is highest in the state, home to 200 million people including farmer Singh. Under an $11.4 billion scheme, more than 7,000 villages across the country were electrified in the 2015/16 financial year, the most since 2011/12, data from state-run Rural Electrification Corp show.

That leaves 10,500 still unconnected, and is only a small percentage of India's 6,00,000 villages. Nor does an electrified village mean everyone living there has power. But reaching people in some of the poorest, most remote areas blunts criticism that Modi has put the rising middle class before rural communities.

Tommy Wilkes & Rupam Jain