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Green technology makes Pune village self-reliant

For the 50-odd residents of Padarwadi, a small village about 100 km from Pune, the laborious task of carrying the paddy produce up and down the hill for de-husking will now be a thing of the past.

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For the 50-odd residents of Padarwadi, a small village about 100 km from Pune, the laborious task of carrying the paddy produce up and down the hill for de-husking will now be a thing of the past.

The village, which was not electrified till now, got a rice mill with electricity generated from locally available Pongamia seeds.

The initiative to electrify the area was undertaken by Pune-based Cummins India Limited that collaborated with the Cummins Engine Research Facility (CERF) at the IIT Bombay and the Renewable Energy and Agricultural Development (READ) Foundation, an NGO, for developing a sustainable and replicable electrification model for remote villages across India.

The primary objective of the programme was to develop and establish a distributed generation model for rural electrification that was economically sustainable, scalable and used the ‘right technology’ for electricity generation utilising locally available renewable energy sources.

In a bid to achieve this goal, a generator set that operates successfully on indigenously developed Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) technology was designed and tested at CERF.

Padarwadi produces 35 tonnes of paddy annually. The produce is carried to a local mill at Bhimashankar several times in a year for de-husking.

In an attempt to ease this burden off the shoulders of the villagers, Cummins along with NGO, Maharashtra Arogya Mandal, met with the villagers to explore the feasibility of running a rice mill with electricity generated from local Pongamia seeds.

With funding from Cummins India Foundation, the generator set was commissioned on Saturday, making the village self-sufficient with locally produced fuel for generating power.

Beau Lintereur, vice-president, Cummins Power Generation, said, “We are delighted with the success of the project and the prospects it presents for the people of Padarwadi. It is the joint efforts of our employees, representatives of Maharashtra Arogya Mandal and most importantly the resilience of the villagers that has resulted in this solution for producing power within the village, which is green, sustainable and scalable.”

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