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Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing a rally to mark the culmination of the 75-day Parivartana rally by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bengaluru on February 4, 2018, said 700,000 houses in Karnataka will be electrified under the Saubhagya scheme.

Pawan Khera, a political analyst working with the Indian National Congress, quoted a tweet by another Twitter handle, and said that the PM has been once again caught peddling misinformation.

Khera said that while the PM claimed there are 700,000 unelectrified villages in Karnataka, there are only under 700,000 villages across the country.

BJP’s IT cell head Amit Malviya was quick to put out a rebuttal on Twitter.

With elections due in April 2018, Modi was at his combative best calling the ruling Congress government a “10-per cent Sarkaar”.

He reminded the people of Karnataka about the Rs 16,000 crore Saubhagya scheme, launched in September 2017, which aims to supply electricity to 40 million households by December 2018.

Modi said 700,000 houses in Karnataka will be electrified under the scheme.

The handle quoted by Khera had used an image of a TV9 show coverage where the ticker clearly attributes “7 lakh villages are living in the dark” to PM Modi’s speech.

The incorrect ticker image then formed the basis for several tweets.

BOOM has not independently verified if the image showed in the tweet was from TV9’s show on Sunday.

Since the Saubhagya scheme was started in October 2017, the progress report for Karnataka shows that unelectrified households have declined to 649,000 after 20,235 households were electrified (as on October 10, 2017).

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Khera is yet to either apologise for the error or delete his erroneous tweet.

(BOOM is an independent digital journalism initiative.)

BOOM Fact Check Team