Village gets light before Diwali 68 years after Independence

'Out of coverage area' is a phrase that both defines and defeats Wada taluka's Tilmall village where, till last week, the sun would charge Ramdas' cellphone. It was only on October 12 this year that electricity hobbled its way into this sleepy hamlet which is only a bit over 100 km from Mumbai but so far relied on kerosene lamps and solar lanterns for light.

"I doubt politicians even know this village exists," smirks 19-year-old Baban, the driver of our jeep, which squeaks, rumbles and spits out hay in protest on the undulating 4-km path from Wada's Ogada village to Tilmall. Politicians, mind you, do manifest in this neighbourhood. "They have had electric poles dug into the ground during elections and then fled with them soon after," says Vijay Jadhav, joint secretary of Shramajeevi Sanghatana, the organisation that helped bring power to Tilmall.

"I am planning to bring home a TV this Diwali," smiles Baban, whose wife Lalitha loves watching Suneil Shetty and Akshay Kumar's films on her brother's TV set in Wada.

For a place that is closer to Mumbai than even Pune is, it should not have taken this long for 22 electricity poles to reach.

But then, the speed of light is often impeded by red tape as isevident from the fact that 187 hamlets in Palghar are still living in the dark. In Khodada, a village near Tilmall, for instance, power came merely two years ago. "Now, there are four television sets there, two of which are for CDs," says Bhupesh, a BCom student from Khodada, who does not like watching TV and prefers getting a newspaper from Wada instead. It was when he worked in a cellphone store in Wada, that he learnt the marked difference between their ways of life. "We are still very primitive," he says.

There are no toilets, water pumps or means of transport in Tilmall. To demonstrate how they transport patients, villagers spread out a bedsheet, tie both ends to a bamboo and ask a girl to jump in the makeshift cradle. She holds on to the stick like a pig on a skewer and enjoys the ride. To fetch water, women travel one and a half kilometres to the Gargai river, carrying four pots each twice a day. They all complain of headaches. "I am losing hair because of it," laments one.