Telangana government has decided to provide free electricity to farmers of state for 24 hours a day with an aim to boost the agriculture sector . The free 24 hours power supply to farmers starts from Monday on experimental basis for five days.
This is a pilot project of the Telangana state government. Earlier state had already been running a pilot project of this kind to the farm sector in three districts during the kharif season. Now they have decided to run it over whole state for initial five to six days. The formal scheme is expected to be launched next year from March-April 2018.
The feedback of the pilot project will be obtained throughout the state, from all districts, sub stations, divisions, transformer-wise. This review will help the government to see how the 24×7 supply of electricity to farmers of Telangana can be sustained on a permanent basis.
Currently there are some states in India which are providing free electricity to farmers but no state is offering it for 24 hours a day. Telangana had earlier extended the power supply from six hours to nine hours at the time of creation of state in 2014. Later CM of Telangana announced to provide 24 24-hours free power. So the government started to supply 24 hours free electricity on experimental basis to its three states having most number of pumps. The three states were old Medak district, old Karimnagar and Nalgonda districts.
The state has total 23 lakh pump sets and out of which 9.58 lakh are in the three states old Medak district, old Karimnagar and Nalgonda districts. Government will additionally need 1,500-2,000 MW power supply to meet the demand of free 24 hours electricity to farmers.
