This Chhattisgarh Village is Living in Darkness Since Independence. Can Upcoming Polls Illuminate the Future? – News18

Retemparra has never seen electricity. The village on the Sukma-Dantewada border of Chhattisgarh has one hand pump to service 90 families. Recently, a make-shift structure has come up to serve as a school.

Gajendra Padami, whose brother — the only graduate in the village — is the pride of the area, said they have never seen electricity in the 76 years since India became independent. “We have written to local officials a number of times but to no avail. Earlier, Naxals would come to this village but now, after a security camp opened up, they have stopped coming. Maybe now the government will listen to our pleas,” Padami said.

Even on the day News18 visited Retemparra, Padami and fellow villagers had gone to the district headquarters to plead for a villager arrested by police for being a CPI(Maoist) member. Villagers here accept that till very recently, CPI(Maoist) members would come to the area to ask for food and shelter which is perhaps why government officials gave the village a miss.

A remote trek

To reach Retamparra, News18 first took a dirt track from the main state highway and then trekked up a hillock from the last motorable point. No electric poles or wires were spotted along the forested area.

Padami pointed to the sole hand pump in the village and a “jharna” (waterfall) as the only water source for the locals. “The hand pump gives 4-5 buckets each day and then runs dry. We mostly depend on the jharna for bathing, washing etc,” he said.

Joga Madhwi’s one-room tenement is pitch-dark, even at noon. In one corner lies a small inverter battery which is the lifeline for young male members of his neighbourhood. “We use this battery to charge our mobiles. In rainy season, when this doesn’t work, we trek down to nearby villages to get our mobiles charged,” he said.

Marwi Lakma, a local, says most children go to the ashram (day boarding set up by government) school. “Now we have a tin roof school in our village so the youngest children go there whenever a guru comes. But they can study only in day time,” he said.

Retemparra is one of the 142 villages in Sukma which still have no electricity. Naxal presence in these parts cut them off from development completely. But now, with security camps and stories of other villages reaching them, residents are gearing up to tell the netas, if they come to ask for votes, that electricity is their main demand.

7 villages recently electrified, raising hopes

Retemparra is still waiting but about a 100 kilometres away, Kunded got lucky on October 17. A bulb was lit in this village for the first time in 20 years. A security camp was established in this Sukma village in December 2022, paving the way for electrification, road construction, and mobile tower installation in this remote area.

“The villagers are celebrating. They are hopeful that through TV and mobiles, their children will see a new world that the elders of the village have never seen,” Sukma SP Kiran Chavan said.

“There was electricity connectivity in these villages till the late 1990s. But Maoists damaged the electricity poles and infrastructure due to which the villagers were deprived of regular power supply for about 25 years,” IG Police P Sundarraj said.

Seven villages — Dabbakonta, Pidmel, Ekalguda, Duramangu, Tumbangu, Singanpad and Dokpad — were electrified through the conventional source of power in the run-up to the polls. Officials said 342 families have befitted and efforts are on to ensure that those left behind are also connected to the power grid soon.