India, Enlightened

(Page 3 of 5)

LET THERE BE LIGHT

"Turn left at the monkeys," Sumant Dubey said to my taciturn driver. We were 200 miles north of the water pyramid now. We drove another five minutes or so along the highway, dodging homicidal Tata trucks, until a narrower road turned off into the scrubby Aravalli Hills. At the intersection, a large, dusty lot served as an informal truck stop, and hundreds of monkeys were rooting around for scraps and handouts.

I had been introduced to Dubey, a cheerful, round-faced young man, a few days earlier in Delhi by Leena Srivastava, executive director of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). Headed by Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel Prize-winning chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, TERI is an unusual hybrid of scholarship, science, policy analysis, and grassroots activism. It has its own university, and its labs specialize in off-the-grid renewable energy technologies.

There are still 400 million people in rural India without access to electricity, Srivastava said, and progress was slow because the government insisted on trying to meet their needs by the conventional means of extending the national grid. "We're still throwing good money after bad," she said. "It's easy enough to set up the infrastructure, even with our monetary constraints, but it's much harder to actually get the electricity flowing through the wires. So distributed generation is something that we need to pursue very aggressively."

We'd been joined now by Dubey's boss, Akanksha Chaurey, an expert on solar photovoltaics. "People are beginning to recognize that a better way to go is the smart mini-grid and micro-grid," she said.

I asked her what she meant by this, and she said, "Multiple small-scale, interconnected power plants in rural areas, serving isolated communities. They may generate power by solar, or small hydro, or biomass. Solar is the easiest, although it's also the most expensive."

What Srivastava said next echoed Kanupriya Harish's point about creating sustainable connections between rural India and the economic mainstream. "In the last two or three years we've proven that if you provide people with the energy they need to run their businesses, you can create new linkages, things like agricultural retail networks where rural people have direct access to urban markets," she said. Take refrigeration: 60 percent of fresh produce is lost before it gets to market; provide affordable electricity, and the local economy can be transformed. The key, she explained, was to identify entrepreneurs, or "franchisees" -- individuals who are known and trusted in their communities, who can make sure that the business model is sound, that the bills are paid, that those miniature power plants remain in good working order. It was much the same vision as that expressed by the jal sabhas in the Thar Desert, only this time to provide energy rather than water.

Chaurey told me about a new TERI program called Lighting a Billion Lives. The name seemed stunningly ambitious -- a billion lives? -- but that didn't seem to faze her. It did, however, raise the question that bedevils any local initiative in a country as vast and complex as India. Can it be replicated? In the jargon of development, is it scalable? The water-harvesting structures in the desert were designed to be scalable in horizontal fashion, so to speak. A solar pyramid creates freshwater; villagers from miles around come to see how it works (these days they may even hear about it by cell phone), and they want one too. The model that TERI was promoting worked vertically as well as horizontally: not only did you show the villages what worked, but you showed the government too, and Srivastava said that on a good day it might even sit up and take notice.

Lighting a Billion Lives was launched last year at a ceremony in which Rajendra Pachauri presented Prime Minister Singh with a handheld solar lantern. The gift was rich in symbolism: it took the power of the sun and the large vision of international climate science and linked them in one direction to the national government and in the other to India's 638,365 villages, all through a simple device that would illuminate the humblest hut in the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan. The only question was, how would people afford it? Even a solar lantern costs about $80, more than most Indians earn in a month.

Dubey, who was responsible for the implementation of the program in Rajasthan, told the driver to follow the narrow blacktop that branched off the Jaipur highway. We passed through a small town, kept going for a few more miles, then turned off onto a one-lane dirt road, and finally bumped along a narrow, rutted track of dried mud until we reached a two-story concrete house at the edge of a field of wheat and gram, the following season's worth of chapatis, parathas, and nans. The house was modest enough, but by the standards of the hamlet -- one of several that make up the village of Badgujran, which has 5,000 people -- it was a mansion. The paunchy, middle-aged man who lived there was the most prosperous person in Badgujran, as well as its solar entrepreneur. He introduced himself as Mahavir Singh.

I asked him why his fields were so green; a rarity in Rajasthan. He removed the cover of his deep tube well, where a rope descended into unfathomable darkness. Five years ago it was 250 feet deep, he said; now he had to go down 800 feet to reach water. It hadn't rained in eight months; the monsoons had ended several weeks earlier than usual. In the old days, wells like these were excavated by gangs of lower-caste workers who charged 150 rupees -- three dollars -- for every foot they dug. Now a truck came with heavy equipment and did the job in a day. But it was expensive. A well like this costs two lakh rupees (Indians count in lakhs, multiples of 100,000, not in millions). Four thousand dollars, in other words, making the tube well something that only the wealthiest farmers could afford. Poorer ones had to sell their land or leave it uncultivated and work for men like Singh as field laborers.

I was surprised to see that the village had some half-hearted electricity poles, although many of the wires were trailing on the ground. The power reached only four or five houses, Singh said, though others had strung up illegal wiring to feed off the current, as poor people have done since electricity was invented. But the supply was dependent on the whims of load-shedding, when a utility shuts down secondary lines like these during hours of peak demand. In Badgujran, that meant that the juice might start to flow at useless times -- at ten at night or four in the morning, while the village slept. And most people couldn't afford it anyway. As Leena Srivastava had said, putting up the infrastructure was the easy part.

Until this year, that left no option but kerosene lamps, still the basic source of light in 68 million Indian homes. Village huts have uneven floors, no windows, walls full of holes and cracks. Kerosene lamps -- usually no more than a bottle with a crude wick -- burn black and smoky. Children knock them over, the wind blows them down. Smoke inhalation and kerosene fires are among the leading causes of child mortality. Furthermore, Chaurey had told me, in terms of the intensity of carbon emissions, kerosene is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Lighting a Billion Lives is TERI's alternative; the program is now up and running in 33 villages in Rajasthan and is expanding rapidly nationwide.

A young woman named Sunita took me up to the roof of Singh's house to show me how it worked. Like many Rajasthani women she was a walking rainbow: orange sari, lime-green scarf spangled with silver, bright bangles and earrings, fingers and toes painted with intricate patterns of henna, a cherry-red cell phone. She showed me the small array of solar panels, which stood next to a stack of dung cakes that had been laid out to dry -- the traditional cooking fuel of village India. A tangle of wires led to a charging station in a small room downstairs, where rows of lanterns, some yellow and some green, were hooked up to chargers. Each lantern will hold a charge for six to eight hours.

What made the idea so attractive was the financing model, Dubey said. With solar power, whether it's a single lantern or a 5,000-megawatt array, the biggest obstacle is the initial cost. Part of the production costs of TERI's lanterns is underwritten by a variety of often surprising corporate sponsors, including GE and Coca-Cola. As the program expands, the unit price will come down, but for most villagers the lanterns will still be out of reach. So TERI's solution is fee for service: rentals, not sales. Each village would have a charging station run by a local entrepreneur, who would rent out the lanterns for a couple of rupees a day -- pegged to the amount an average family would otherwise spend on kerosene.

Mahavir Singh led me along a narrow path through the fields to a cluster of mud-walled houses and a small white temple. Green parakeets raised a racket in a large neem tree. There were several small holes around the base of the tree. Singh said they were cobra dens. About 10 villagers are bitten every month, but most are cured by a holy man who lives nearby, with a poultice of neem leaves -- highly prized in traditional Ayurvedic medicine -- and hair from a cow's tail.

We came to a hut where three or four scrawny goats had their faces stuck in a feed bowl and a bad-tempered water buffalo strained at its heavy metal chain. The woman of the house invited us inside. Some children's T-shirts hung on a clothesline. The wall was covered with pictures of Hindu gods and gurus. Next to them was an Iberia poster that showed an airplane taking off over a chalet hotel in the Alps and a row of motorboats at anchor on a sapphire lake. The inspirational motto on the poster said: "Don't wait for your ship to come in, swim out for it."

"The solar lanterns allow people to do many things," Dubey said. Women gathered in the evenings to discuss health and family issues; the embroiderers and carpet makers in a nearby hamlet were working longer hours and making more money. This woman's two sons were sitting in the glow of a lantern on the mud floor of another room. The 13-year-old, Ajay, was using the lamp to do his English homework.

It was dark now, and Singh had switched on his own lantern to guide us back through the snaky field. As we stood outside his house, making our goodbyes, I noticed something I hadn't seen earlier. He had water, he had energy, and now I saw that he also had the third element of prosperity: mobility, a car. An entry-level Tata Indica hatchback, to be precise. He said it was the only one in the village. I couldn't imagine how he had brought it here, along that potholed track.

I asked if he had heard of the Tata Nano, which was scheduled to be unveiled in Mumbai at the end of March and was already making headlines around the globe. At one lakh -- $2,000 -- it would be the cheapest car in the world, and it would get more than 50 miles to the gallon. Some people said it would usher in a car-owning revolution. I asked Mahavir Singh if he might be interested in a Nano himself. He thought about it for a while, but seemed skeptical. "Perhaps," he said. "But I'd need to see it first." A sentiment that many Indian environmentalists have echoed, albeit for different reasons.

Continued...