Three years after lighting up electricity deprived remote villages in Indian states Bihar
and Uttar Pradesh with power harnessed through rice husk, the team behind the venture is now looking at a similar task in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu as well.
Beginning with Tamkuha, in Bihar's West Champaran district where villagers stopped travelling kilometres to the nearest city to charge their mobile phones, the 'Husk Power
System' designed by NRI entrepreneur Gyanesh Pandey has gone on to dispel darkness in over 125 villages since 2007.
"The conventional technologies and grids had failed to deliver for the pervasive energy starvation in the country and I wanted to find an environment-friendly non-conventional source and low cost of energy," Pandey told PTI.
A native of Bihar's Baithania village, Pandey chucked a promising career in the semiconductor industry in the US to return to do good in India.
The engineering and graduate management along with friends Ratnesh Yadav, Manoj Sinha and Charles W Ransler started the husk power system company aimed at bringing power to empower the rural population.
Assisted by S K Singh, a scientist in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Pandey's team rejigged the decades-old technology of biomass gasification deployed by rice millers in Bihar to power their mills using rice husk,
perhaps the only bio-waste in the lives of rural folk.
"The process is called gasification, where the husk is burnt in controlled conditions to produce a combustible mixture of gases (smoke). This gas is filtered and fed into an engine that drives an alternator to produce power," says
Pandey.
The idea was not only to provide electricity but also to provide it at a rate lower than the cost of the current alternative significantly keeping a unit profitable enough to ensure its long term functioning.
"The baseline price is Rs 80 per month for two CFLs + mobile charging (approx 50W) per month. Users get discount as they purchase more than 100 W. The baseline price is less than
the fixed charges levied by the state grid (Rs 250 in Patna).
The idea is to slash the cost of the alternative by atleast half," says Ratnesh.
Remoteness of the locations required that the
operations be carried out as much as possible by the locals and that demanded the entire model to be simple enough in execution. The mantra was to keep it cheap and simple, and after many trials, a near optimal model took shape.
Around 200 locals run the operations today.
On the 60th Independence Day of India in
2007, the remote and run-down village of Tamkuha (literally meaning fog of darkness) got electricity for the first time.
A local teacher Rambalak Yadav summed up the jubilant mood in the village, "after sixty independent years, we have found freedom from darkness."
The changes were remarkably visible and positive. The village that was usually set in slumber within a few hours of sunset now bustles with activity till late into the night.
The children had few extra bright hours to study; the housewives no more rushed to finish the cooking before their lamps ran out of kerosene and the local shopkeepers got extra hours for business. There was also reduction in cases of snakebites and theft.
Currently, the village sports several video halls, there is a surge in television ownership as well as a surge in employment with as many as fifty new jobs in the village.
However, having a good enough business model and a working technology in the backwaters of Bihar doesn't guarantee any larger success. The much needed exposure for the breakthrough came from Pandey's college friend Manoj Sinha and
his colleague, both business students at the University of Virginia at that time.
The duo presented the model at various business idea competitions that led to exposure and a stream of investors including the World Bank group and technology giant CISCO.
"The Indian government took notice of the effort as well and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy came forward and extended their subsidy scheme to fit the needs of the
project and the co-operative department in Bihar showed an interest in setting up units," says Sinha.
The company says it is confident of making profits by mid next year plans to expand operations into West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and spreading out even
outside India to Nepal.