Pilot project runs on solar energy at Darewadi village on Pune-Nashik road.
For IIM Bangalore alumni Sameer Nair and Anshuman Lath, Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken has a special meaning: they conceived Gram Oorja Solutions Private Limited dedicated to electrification of villages in India using innovative solutions. The task before the company is of leviathan proportions as by a rough estimate, India has 50,000 villages without electricity.
While rural electrification has been talked about, the progress to conquer the rural darkness has been anything but fast. The mega schemes of the government, at times, have failed to deliver the desired results and Gram Oorja plans to take up the challenge using non-conventional sources of energy.
“Usage of renewable source of energy for generation of power in rural areas has been tried, but according to us, the major flaw in the past projects had to do with the fact that the villagers were not involved in the decision-making of the project,” said Lath.
Both pointed out that in many places, it has been observed that the infrastructure put up for village electrification had stopped working due to technical snags or usage of substandard material.
The innovation devised by Gram Oorja consists of involving the villagers at the grass root level. Their pilot project, for such a scheme, at Darewadi, a small village off the Pune-Nashik Road, was the laboratory for the same. In fact, the villagers were involved from day one and the power plant, which lights up the village is owned, managed and run by a trust formed by the villagers. The project in Darewadi, runs on solar energy. Along with Bosch, Gram Oorja installed a solar energy power plant, which is being run by the villagers now.
“At times, some potential investors do back away from the plans as they feel it does not fit into their definition of charity. But, we firmly believe that till the time villagers are not directly involved in the process, the power plant would not be a success,” said Nair.
At this moment, in the projects of village electrification, Gram Oorja, involves the backing of corporates for erection of the basic infrastructure. But the team of Gram Oorja, which also includes people like Sumeet Sutar, Kiran Auti, Prasad Kulkarni, Shekar Lokhande and Priya Purwar believe that this project would become a working model in the near future.
Lath confided that next year they intend to take up the electrification of 75 villages and set up 10 minigrids. Already talks are in the final phase for replication of the Darewadi project in a village in north Karnataka.
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