India's women solar engineers light up rural life
By Nilanjana Bhowmick
TILONIA, India (AlertNet) - Mira Bai frowns in concentration at the complicated zigzag of wires on the panel in front of her. Unfathomable to most, they speak loud and clear to the 60-year-old grandmother.
Despite being illiterate, she now knows exactly which wires to connect to create the magical connection between the sun and the panel so it absorbs and transfers rays to the battery that will later light up her house.
Bai is one of 15,000 solar engineers who have attended a six-month training course at a rural college in India’s northwest state of Rajasthan, enabling them to bring renewable power to their villages.
Bai’s classmates are similar to her in many ways. They are over 35 years of age, illiterate or semi-literate, and have never left their villages.
The Barefoot College teaches women like Bai from the most remote corners of the country to become solar engineers. The focus is not on obtaining a paper qualification, but on utilising women’s instincts and practical knowledge of their communities.
The women are chosen by their villages, and once they go home, they are responsible for fabrication, installation, usage, repair and maintenance of the solar lighting units they have learned about.
Bai travelled to attend the residential college all the way from a far-flung village in Madhya Pradesh. She took buses for over two days to reach the nearest town, where she boarded a train that arrived in Tilonia after 14 hours.
In her village, there is no electric light. In India, as of August 2010, 89,808 villages were still un-electrified. Over 40 percent of the country’s population has no access to energy.
DIRTY KEROSENE
Living in Madhya Pradesh, one of India’s most impoverished states, Bai was a contract farmer and daily wage labourer. For six months a year she worked on other people’s wheat fields, and for the rest of the year, she would go to Raigada, the nearest city, to earn money as a construction labourer with her two sons.
“We cannot afford to sit at home. So, when there is no work in the village, we go and work in the city,” she says.
Bai’s family lives in a mud house lit with kerosene lamps. “The soot from the kerosene dirties our houses a lot,” Bai says, unaware of the other harmful effects of burning kerosene, which emits carbon dioxide and thereby contributes to global warming.
Rural Life In India - News
Bai is one of 15000 solar engineers who have attended a six-month training course at a rural college in India's northwest state of Rajasthan, enabling them to bring renewable power to their villages. Bai's classmates are similar to her in many ways.
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