About 240 million Indians lack reliable electricity supply in India, according to an International Energy Agency report in 2015. While the government is banking heavily on large-scale solar power installations to rectify the situation, with plans to install 100 gigawatts of solar power by 2022, Barefoot College plans to introduce solutions at the level of individual homes.
The organization has established a campus in the western state of Rajasthan, which receives some of the highest solar intensity per unit area in India. Here, over a period of six months, women are trained to use color-coded parts and assemble them into off grid solar panels. Men were initially trained by the organisation, but most of them never returned to their villages, preferring to find employment with their newly learnt skills. It is only when the organization focused on training women, that things began to look brighter.
Besides assembly, the women are also trained to install the panels, charging stations and small LED lights. While this may not seem like much, it can be quite a boon for many Indians who still rely on kerosene lamps for lighting. As of 2015, the college’s graduates have brought light to some 20,000 houses in more than 300 villages.
Barefoot College founder, Bunker Roy, believes decentralized solutions such as this are the only solution for India’s dysfunctional power problems. Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, known as the father of the Indian nation, he said, “Mahatma Gandhi said the ultimate solution for fighting poverty in India was not mass production but production by the masses. We have to apply the Gandhian model to solar-electrifying villages.”
The project is currently funded by donations and government grants, which some believe, make it difficult to emulate over a national scale. Roy however believes that the project empowers each village to be self-sufficient. Each village pays its “barefoot engineer” to repair of install new units. This money is not an additional expense, and is essentially coming from the funds they save from kerosene expenditure. This makes each village independent of the project once the women are trained, he explained.
The project has also attracted the interest of researchers. Karina Standal and her colleague Tanja Winther are from the University of Oslo’s Center of Development and Environment, and are here to study the project’s impact. Explaining the importance of women participating in the manufacturing process and the effect that access to electricity has on their lives, Standal explained, “In terms of empowerment, the women feel that access to solar electricity gave them an easier everyday life and sense of accomplishments in pursuing their roles as mothers and wives/daughters-in-law and the like. This is, of course, very important in raising their life quality.”
