The Saubhagya Scheme aims at universal
- (a)LPG connection.
- (b)household electrification.
- (c)primary school education.
- (d)public health insurance.
Correct — B, household electrification. Saubhagya is short for Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana, and the name carries the answer — sahaj bijli har ghar, easy electricity for every home. Announced in September 2017 by the Ministry of Power, it was aimed at the last mile: not at reaching villages, which earlier programmes had largely done, but at connecting the individual houses inside them that still had no meter. The distinction is the point of the scheme. A village counted as electrified once public places and a tenth of its households had power, so a village could be electrified on paper while most of its families still used kerosene. Saubhagya went after those families directly, giving free connections to households identified from the Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011 and charging others Rs 500, recoverable in instalments. The outlay was about Rs 16,320 crore, of which Rs 12,320 crore was gross budgetary support.
- (a)LPG connection. — That is Ujjwala, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which gave deposit-free cooking gas connections to women from poor households from 2016. The two schemes are frequently swapped in question papers because both are household-level connection drives launched within about a year of each other; the fuel is what separates them.
- (c)primary school education. — School education runs through Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and its successor Samagra Shiksha, under an entirely different ministry, and rests on the right to education rather than on a connection drive.
- (d)public health insurance. — Universal health cover is the business of Ayushman Bharat, launched in 2018 with a hospitalisation cover for poor and vulnerable families. Nothing about Saubhagya is an insurance programme.
India's rural power effort came in stages. First the grid was carried to villages, under the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana and then the Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana, which also separated agricultural from domestic feeders. Then came the household layer, which is Saubhagya. The two are different problems: a line running past a house does not put a meter inside it, and the barrier at that stage is the connection charge, the wiring and the paperwork rather than the absence of a network.
Scheme questions of this shape are almost always testing whether a candidate can keep the connection drives apart, and the four options here are four different things a household might be connected to. Reading the Hindi in the full name is the fastest route — sahaj bijli har ghar leaves no room for doubt. Anchoring to the exam, the scheme was still formally running in early 2021 with a residual list of unconnected homes; it was declared closed in March 2022, by which time about 2.82 crore households had been connected over four years. Saturating connections is not the same as reliable supply, and hours of supply and the financial health of distribution companies remain the live questions in this sector.
- Saubhagya is the Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana, announced in September 2017 by the Ministry of Power.
- Its object was universal household electrification — last-mile connections to houses that had none.
- Connections were free for households identified from the Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011; others paid Rs 500, recoverable in instalments.
- Outlay was about Rs 16,320 crore, including gross budgetary support of about Rs 12,320 crore.
- It was declared closed in March 2022, with about 2.82 crore households connected.
- Village electrification, a different and earlier target, ran through the Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana.
- Swapping Saubhagya with Ujjwala; one is electricity, the other cooking gas.
- Treating village electrification and household electrification as the same target.
- Reading a connection to every home as a guarantee of round-the-clock supply.
As an identify-the-scheme item from its objective, or as a match-the-following pairing flagship schemes with their ministries.
In August 2006, the Government of India notified the Rural Electrification Policy. This policy aims at provision of access to all households by which year?
- (a) 2008
- (b) 2009
- (c) 2010
- (d) 2012
Answer(b) 2009
The same target, set a decade earlier and missed. The 2006 policy already promised access to all households by 2009, which is the best measure of how large the last-mile gap still was when Saubhagya was announced in 2017.
CDS_GK_2020_I_Q482020Saubhagya, a Government of India Scheme, relates to which of the following areas?
- (a) Achieving universal household electrification
- (b) Providing clean cooking fuel to poor households
- (c) Rationalizing subsidies on LPG
- (d) Stopping female foeticide
Answer(a) Achieving universal household electrification
The same scheme asked a year earlier with the same trap beside it — clean cooking fuel as the nearest wrong option. CDS has repeated this pairing, so learning the two connection drives together is worth the effort.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana provides poor households with
- (a)free electricity connections
- (b)deposit-free LPG connections
- (c)piped drinking water connections
- (d)subsidised health insurance
Answer(b) deposit-free LPG connections — Ujjwala is the clean cooking fuel programme, and it is the scheme most often confused with Saubhagya.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which one of the following schemes was aimed at village-level electrification and feeder separation rather than at connecting individual households?
- (a)Saubhagya
- (b)Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana
- (c)Ayushman Bharat
- (d)Samagra Shiksha
Answer(b) Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana — it carried the network to villages and separated agricultural from domestic feeders; Saubhagya then took the connection into the house.