Lighting up lives in rural India

[jpak]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Lighting_up_lives_in_rural_India/articleshow/2144303.cms

NEW DELHI: An auto driver, a midwife, a rose picker...these may not sound like your average consumers of renewable energy but for Harish Hande, a 37-year-old engineer whose solar energy company Selco India recently won the prestigious ‘Green Oscar', it's all about tailoring innovation to match a particular need. "Rural India isn't running microwaves and ACs. Here, a little electricity goes a long way," says the IIT Kharagpur alumnus who founded the company 12 years ago.

Let there be light

The solar panel installed above R Vijaya Kumar's small house on the outskirts of Bangalore has ignited the change from auto driver to entrepreneur. Every day at 4 pm, Kumar drives to the Bomanahalli market on the outskirts of Bangalore with 50 batteries that he hires out to street vendors for Rs 15 per battery per night. He returns at 11 pm to take them back, having made thrice what he would earn as an auto driver. Not only can the vendors give up their polluting kerosene lamps for a cleaner and cheaper energy alternative but Kumar gets enough money to repay the loan he took to buy the solar panels with which he recharges the batteries every day.

Both in Karnataka and Gujarat where Selco works, lives have been touched — and transformed by solar power. From helping midwives in Gujarat to deliver children with the aid of solar lighting kits to giving rose-pickers outside Bangalore solar-powered headlamps so that they can work in the pre-dawn darkness with their hands free, innovation has been the key to success.

"Design has to be customised to fit the needs of the customer. The one-size-fits-all approach that's usually used when the user is from a financially weak background invariably fails," says Hande.

<more>

[Nihil]

1. K & R (n/t)