Despite millennium city tag, Gurgaon’s adjacent villages left ‘powerless’

With high rises and other flashy buildings coming up all around them, residents of villages in the area had hoped that their lives would also get better in terms of constant power supply and a host of other amenities that are provided to the area’s new urban settlers. But the power supply system and schedules in the suburban-turned ‘rural’ areas of Gurgaon continue to be the same as it was 20 years ago.

‘The Haryana government claims that the state has surplus electricity, but people from villages whose agricultural land has been purchased by private builders or acquired by the state government, are facing electricity supply problems as these were over two decades back,’ said Sudhir Kumar, a resident. The areas adjoining industrial units in Gurgaon are worst affected amid allegations that the quota allotted for domestic power supply was transferred to factories due to vested interests. Out of the total 210 villages of district Gurgaon, the land of nearly 100 villages surrounding Gurgaon was either purchased by private players, including top builders and industrialists, or acquired by the state government for its own projects. Villages in the Manesar, Binola, Badshahpur and Daultabad belt are no longer ‘villages’ by culture, nature and lifestyle, residents felt.