Bokaro: With the Lok Sabha elections just a year away, PM Manmohan Singh on Tuesday turned the foundation-laying ceremony of the Bokaro Steel Plant's expansion and modernisation programme into an occasion for announcing sops for Jharkhand. He said the Centre was planning to open a new university and an institute of management in Jharkhand. He added that the Centre would give Rs 120 crore for upgrading the Ranchi-based Rajendra Prasad Chikitsha Bigyan Sansthan. He also proposed schemes to convert the Barhi-Jamshedpur, Hazaribag-Ranchi, Ranchi-Jamshedpur roads into four-lane highways.

The public sector Jaipur Vidyut Vitaran Nigam has formulated an ambitious plan for supply of electricity to 693 villages and 1,296 hamlets in seven districts of Jaipur, Bharatpur and Kota divisions this year with an expenditure of Rs.197.57 crore. The Chairman and Managing Director of Jaipur discom, R.G. Gupta, said here on Thursday that the villages to be electrified during 2008-09 would include 96 where no power transmission lines presently exist. Over 4 lakh families, including 2.96 lakh living below poverty line (BPL), inhabit these villages.

The state government is determined to ensure arrangements of drinking water, power and roads in every village. This was said by Panchayat and Rural Development Minister Rustam Singh while laying the foundation stone of a stop dam to be constructed at a cost of Rs 64.84 lakh at village Bamrauli in Janpad Morena Panchayat. The stop dam would be constructed under National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

People have seen a change in their quality of life, thanks to the solar lighting system. "My son stays up later than all of us, studying through the night," says Guddi Devi, a resident of Dabkan- Kartikeya Singh, Alwar It is a simple device but it has shrunk the nights in Rajasthan's countryside. Over the past decade, thousands of families in the state's remote villages, unconnected with the grid, have installed solar lighting systems at their homes, which harness solar energy to generate electricity.

Eighty families living in Galapalleyaya village in the Ibbagamuwa DS division in a memorandum to Salinda Dissanayake, Kurunegala district MP and Minister of Coconut Development has requested him to take action to provide them with electricity under the Keppetiya-Yakadagolla-Galapalleyaya rural electrification scheme which was opened on April 24, 2007.

Over the past decade, thousands of families in Rajasthan's remote villages have installed solar lighting systems at their homes, which harness solar energy to generate electricity.

In a major boost to attain self sufficiency in energy, the Centre today allotted a huge number of solar energy instruments to Asom.

Dilapidated roads, un-electrified villages betray govt claims

The Rural Electrification Corporation (REC) has sanctioned a sum of Rs 55.86 crore to carry out various developmental activities.

Farmers in the state are in for a bonanza as power companies have chalked out a strategy to write off 100 per cent surcharge and 50 per cent energy charge of the power bills due against them for using

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