With the aim of empowering tribal women in the Dungarpur district of Rajasthan, a 64-member team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay is working along with local tribal communities to set up a solar module manufacturing plant, and training them to assemble solar lamps, through the institute’s project SoUL. Currently over 60 tribal women from the self-help group of the district are part of the manufacturing unit.
Through this initiative, the team has distributed one million solar lamps, and will be further distributing over seven million more such lamps.
Speaking about the new solar module manufacturing unit in Dungarpur, Chetan Singh Solanki, principal investigator of the Million SoUL Project at IIT Bombay, said, “The tribal communities are more skilled than the urban. It has been easy to train them in 10 days. The training will help them to get more employment at the local level. We want to get a sustainable solution. Beyond the lifetime of the project, the skills will help the local women to get a source of earning.”
The IITB team has been working on this project in different states of India, but this is the first initiative where they have set up a local manufacturing module along with the tribal women’s self-help group. “The local women’s self-help group is an individual body which has a strong network. In 2016, the group in Dungapur earned Rs 80 lakh by assembling solar lamps, and a collective amount of Rs 32 lakhs was collected by the tribal women through the setting up of the manufacturing plant. As the project grows, besides solar lamps, we will be training them to make other products using solar technology. This project will help the local manufacturers earn more money for their livelihood,” said Solanki.
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