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WASHINGTON, Jun 1 (OneWorld.net) - In India, teams of "barefoot solar engineers" are bringing electricity to rural villages. The project -- part of a larger campaign to help Indian villagers be self-sufficient -- trains women to build and maintain solar energy units.

A community meeting in a rural Indian village. © mckaysavage (flickr)What's the Story?

The solar power initiative is run by the Barefoot College in Tilonia, a village in Rajasthan, India. Founded by Indian activist Bunker Roy in 1972, the college helps Indian villagers become self-sufficient and puts special emphasis on developing women's skills.

"Many have been inspired by women in nearby villages who left for Tilonia with hope and returned grasping the power of light," reports Sathya Saran in an article for Ms. Magazine. "Most of the women are unlettered, extremely poor and often widowed or abandoned. But their eyes blaze with newfound confidence."

Rural women from India, Afghanistan, Ghana, and Syria are trained at the college and then dispatched to train other village women -- who in turn pass on their knowledge -- to construct and run solar energy units.

Writes Saran: "these 'Sunshine Warriors' comprise a force for change that the college sends out to transform lives around the world." (See the full article from Ms. Magazine below.)

Overcoming the Energy-Poverty Trap

Roughly 40 percent of the world's population -- living predominantly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa -- do not have modern fuels for cooking and heating.

Of these 2.6 billion people, 1.6 billion "have no access to electricity, three-quarters of them living in rural areas," notes Share the World's Resources, a group advocating for sustainable economic practices that alleviate poverty.

In India, 220,000 villages lack electricity.

However, says openDemocracy's Alejandro Litovsky, hundreds of projects from Guatemala to India to Uganda "demonstrate the potential of energy innovations to overcome energy poverty -- a mix of wind, solar, small hydro, biomass power, or technology such as LED lighting."

These initiatives can enable the poor to set up small income-generating businesses and achieve autonomy and independence in energy generation.

"Off-grid projects are increasingly seen in areas where publicly regulated electricity grids have found it unviable to reach," continues Litovsky.

Moreover, he says, new sources of energy "can deliver real change on the ground, enabling citizens to access refrigerated medicines, light schoolrooms, power water pumps, and use mobile telecommunications -- but only if they are tailored to local needs and delivered in sustainable ways."

Poverty in Rural India

India's status as an emerging global superpower rests on narrow economic data drawn from its booming middle class of 50 million people, less than 5 percent of the population. Beneath this veneer, hundreds of millions of people face a daily struggle for essentials.

While varying interpretations of India's poverty figures have been made by the government and anti-poverty institutions like the World Bank, it is clear that vast numbers of households survive close to the poverty line.

Many development organizations like the Barefoot College have focused on empowering women to help these rural villages.

Additionally, "in the remotest corners of the country, women leaders have started questioning corruption, inefficiency, and lack of basic necessities in their villages," writes OneWorld South Asia's Manasi Singh. 

Women in India

The voices of women in India are not always heard or respected, however. "Various social conditions have hindered and undermined the roles of women, denying them voices and opportunity to participate in public life," continues Singh.

Zahira Bano, a woman who ran for public office in India and lost, endured pressure and threats from conservative clerics when she became the first woman to contest election results "in a region heavily influenced by religion and tradition," says Singh.

"Maulvis [religious leaders] do not allow us to come to the fore and participate in the political process as they consider it blasphemy," Bano told Singh. "But nowhere the religion debars women. Take the case of Iran, Iraq -- where women have entered parliament."

A constitutional amendment passed in 1993 mandated that 33.3 percent of the seats in India's local governing bodies be reserved for women. Now, more than 1 million women from diverse backgrounds are serving as elected representatives.

There are, however, still cultural pressures working against women. One manifestation of this is a high incidence of ultrasound gender diagnoses, many of which are followed by an abortion if the fetus is a girl.

The gender ratio in India is 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6. This is the most imbalanced gender ratio in the world, and it's declining further.

For more information on poverty, health, development, and human rights in India, see OneWorld.net's India country guide. 

Electrifying Women

India's "barefoot engineers" light up the world

From: Ms. Magazine

Spring 2009

By Sathya Saran

NIEITHER SATYANARAYAN SINHA NOR THE FOUR WOMEN HE INTRODUCES AS HIS team look like adventurers. Dressed in clean cotton clothes that have seen better days, they might be a group of peasants in any rural Indian village. And, indeed, they work out of the village of Tilonia, bordering the desert of the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, a place where life includes smoky wood fires, poor-quality drinking water and other hardships imposed by climate and poverty. But these women are used to transcending their circumstances: They are "barefoot solar engineers" who bring solar-powered light to rural India.

For example, during a trip they took to the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, they cut their way through dense jungles, venturing into remote areas where no government official would go. There, the team trained two women chosen from each nearby village at a workshop in the city of Hyderabad-trainees who in turn taught others in their villages to construct and run solar energy units. One hundred batteries, hung on long poles, were carried through the 20-kilometer-long mud paths to the main post office servicing the region's villages, and that became the battery pickup location. Sinha and his team then visited each village in turn, training women to install the units. Adequate spares were left to replace damaged or worn parts, and a workshop for maintenance was set up at a central locale. In all, the team brought electric light to 200 homes, and ensured that village women learned how to maintain the electrification project after they left.

"The effort was funded by the UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] and India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy," Sinha explains, "but it cannot work unless the villagers themselves make it their own project."

And they certainly have.

Such solar projects are part of a campaign run by the Barefoot College in Tilonia, founded by Bunker Roy in 1972 to help make Indian villagers self-sufficient, with an emphasis on using women's skills. The college (www.barefootcollege.org) has now reached out to more than 125,000 people in 160 villages over an area of 500 square miles, addressing such problems as sanitation and safe drinking water by building toilets and underground reservoirs, where rainwater is harvested and stored. It has also focused attention on rural unemployment, income generation and waste recycling. A key priority is the education of girls, normally taboo in rural Rajasthan. Furthermore, the college trains girls and boys from other Indian states to work together, discover their own skills or acquire new ones, and set themselves up with forms of income generation.

The Barefoot College is also home to the Women Barefoot Solar Cooker Engineers Society, the first registered organization of semiliterate and literate women in Rajasthan. These women design, produce, install, maintain and repair parabolic solar cookers-some of which have already been installed in nearby villages to meet cooking needs of more than 400 people daily-and the cooker engineers also train the women who purchase their products.

But it's the Barefoot solar engineers who install electricity who pique the greatest interest of visitors to the college's villager-designed and -built main campus. That's because all electricity needs of the entire 80,000 square feet of the solar-electrified campus are maintained by women, and because these "Sunshine Warriors" comprise a force for change that the college sends out to transform lives around the world.

Kamla, Lada and Dhapu-three women between the ages of 19 and 24, each with less than secondaryschool education-were the first solar engineers trained. Of the three, only Kamla had the support of her fatherin-law who, despite family disapproval, allowed her to complete her training. Today Kamla is in charge of maintaining solar systems for two field centers.

Over the years, Tilonia's solar engineers have not only gained acceptance in the community but earned respect as trainers of women from other Indian states and from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ghana, Syria and Uganda. These days, the campus bustles with women: 36 new recruits from eight countries will live and learn at Tilonia for six months, leaving fully equipped to set up and run solar electrification for their villages. Most of the women are unlettered, extremely poor and often widowed or abandoned. But their eyes blaze with newfound confidence. Many have been inspired by women in nearby villages who left for Tilonia with hope and returned grasping the power of light. Repeat attendance from already electrified communities is common, since new groups of women come to learn soldering and repairing so they can share the work or spread the knowledge to neighboring villages.

Considering that the students speak a number of different languages, "We have a communication problem, of course," Sinha explains. "But we have a system that seems to work well." Training includes a lot of practical work, including making transformers by hand. A workbook contains every key word needed for communication and instruction in Hindi, English and the language of the foreign student, plus a color-coded system. Posters in black, brown and red display different aspects of the technical work, with all three languages used here, too.

"By the time they are ready to go back [home], women who arrived weak with malnourishment, shabby [and] sometimes ill-kempt look cleaner, have gained weight with regular meals and show new confidence in their step, carrying the knowledge they are empowered to help their villages," says Sinha.

At one location on campus, an instructor is teaching a woman apprentice to assemble a solar panel. They sit sawing an iron strip, while the instructor's baby plays nearby. These are the panels that have helped provide three hours of light per evening to 1,530 homes in 28 remote villages in Ladakh, in the northern reaches of India. Elsewhere on campus, solar lanterns-another aspect of solar energy-are being assembled by Tilonia women from components brought from the city of Jaipur. When charged in sunlight for eight hours, a 40-watt lantern can light two lamps for four hours, enough for a household's evening. More than 3,500 such lanterns have so far been manufactured at the college.

The statistics are formidable, the work incessant. But the radiance of these Sunshine Warriors continues to grow, illuminating in more ways than one the most remote, impoverished corners of the world. It is a story, literally, of women's energy.

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