Project taken up at the behest of a Canadian entrepreneur.
A lighting device designed by the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (Cept) university are set to light up millions of rural households in the country. A Canada-based social entrepreneur, Dave Halliday, has chosen students of the university for the task.
Around 28 students from different disciplines of the university are working on a project to design a lighting device based on solar-charged battery and Light Emitting Diodes (LED) lamps. The solar home lighting devices will be designed for use by rural homes that have no access to electricity.
The project has been assigned to Cept by Visionary Lighting and Energy India Ltd., which aims to market these products in rural areas across the world. Founder-director of the company, Dave Halliday, who is also a professor at Schulich School of Engineering in Canada, said, “We intend to develop a lighting system which is economically and practically suitable for rural homes which still do not have modern electric lighting. According to reliable data, there are 400 million homes without electric light in India and 2 billions across the world.”
While the company will handle the technicalities of the electronics, the students of Cept will be designing a casing for the products. A research scholar of IIT Bombay who is guiding the students of Cept in their designs, Kumar Esan said, “The students are expected to look into the aesthetical aspect of the casing; the product is also expected to be sturdy and user-friendly, keeping the rural context in mind. It is also very important that the design should be easy to manufacture on a large scale to make it cost-effective.”
Talking about the portable multifunctional lighting device, the director of Visionary Lighting and Energy India Ltd., P. Sridhar, said, “The product will be competitively priced to make them affordable to rural people. We have improved our system to give better efficiency than the best LED lights available today.”
Esan said, “The battery will get fully charged in around 8 hours and will power 3 LED lights for 48 hours.” A professor of Cept who is coordinating the programme said, “The project provides a good opportunity for our students to not only learn and gain better understanding about designing but also sensitise them towards the needs of the rural population in the country.”
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