PM Modi learns his lesson after his Independence Day blooper

Nagla Fatela was a blooper which PM Narendra Modi would like to forget, but not before learning lessons from it.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the nation during the 70th Independence Day function at the historic Red Fort in New Delhi. | PTI
Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the nation during the 70th Independence Day function at the historic Red Fort in New Delhi. | PTI

NEW DELHI: Nagla Fatela was a blooper which PM Narendra Modi would like to forget, but not before learning lessons from it.

Learning lessons from the blooper which had embarrassed the government on the last Independence Day where he had wrongly claimed about electrification of a village near Delhi, the PM has constituted a special cell in the PMO last week with a joint secretary at its head to cross check and verify every data submitted to the PMO.

Modi mentioned the name of Nagla Fatela during his Independence Day speech where he had said: “It takes three hours to reach Nagla Fatela in Hathras but it took 70 years for electricity to reach here.”

PM, in fact, was partially correct in his statement as infrastructure has been laid in the village under the Centre’s ambitious Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana Scheme to electrify rural villages. But there last-mile connectivity—which means connecting the houses with the electricity poles —is still missing.

“The new cell is being constituted with a special purpose of verifying and cross checking the data. There should not be Nagla Fatela bloopers anymore,’’ said the source.

According to the official, the blooper happened as the Ministry of Power handed over the data without any cross verification.

They may have taken it very casually and may had no idea that it is to be used in the PM’s speech on the occasion of the Independence Day,’’ said the official. “The new cell will not coordinate with each ministry and state governments to cross check and verify all the data being submitted to the PMO. The cell can also be directly in touch with the district administration. It can even call up officials at panchayat level if the need arises,” said the official.

According to the official, the government is also planning to make the official concerned accountable if any data goes wrong. “There should be accountability at all levels where the data are being collated. So the government is planning to make the data collection and verification processes more fool proof,’’ said the official.

He said the PMO recently found out a serious anomaly in the data with regard to Swach Bharat Abhiyan drive in the country. The gap between official data collated by the ministry concerned and the ground reality was around 71 per cent.

“This data is being collate to be used for a speech which PM will deliver in October. But since the memory of Nagla Fatela is still fresh in memory, we decided to cross check and the reality was far away from the statistics,’’ said the official.

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