Taking a cue from Gujarat, an ambitious multi-crore plan of separating electricity supply lines for agriculture and households in Madhya Pradesh's rural areas has begun with an aim to provide round-the-clock power supply to the domestic consumers in remote areas.

"We have fixed the target of separating the agriculture and household lines in rural areas of the state by 2012," Madhya Pradesh Minister of State for Energy (Independent Charge) Rajendra Shukla told PTI.

For this purpose, he said that a loan of more than Rs 5,000 crore has been sought from the Rural Electrification Corporation (REC).

"We want to supply round-the-clock power to the rural households and for this purpose the work to streamline the distribution system has begun," Shukla said.

The three power disribution companies -- Madhya Pradesh Central Power Distribution Company Limited, MP Eastern Power Distribution Company Limited and MP Western Power Distribution Company Limited -- have started the work of separating the lines in their respective rural areas, he said.

"Right now all the three distribution companies have started work on their own with whatever funds under different heads available with them in this regard," Shukla said.

Presently, rural areas in Madhya Pradesh are getting power for hardly 10 hours daily, as the major chunk of the electricity is being used for agriculture purposes, officials said.

As of now, the rural populace is unhappy with the government for erratic power supply to their households and the state was helpless in providing energy to them as it was not having seperate lines for it.

After pruning the power distribution system in rural areas, the state government wants to provide round the clock power to households and fix hours of supply to agriculture sector, officials said.

In Gujarat, the rural households and agriculture supply system was separated, a MPSEB engineer who recently visited that state, said adding that they accomplished this work in 1000 days.

He said that the Gujarat government gave 90 per cent grant to its state electricity Board to prune rural energy distribution network, adding that more than Rs 1200 crore was spent on this work.