As more and more Indians get on the grid, the government's pushing solar.
| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 1:40 PM PDT
Solar plates charging outside a house in eastern India.
This story first appeared on the Atlantic Cities website and is reproduced here as part of theClimate Desk collaboration.
It's a little after sundown, and Arun Kumar is hawking his wares in the neighborhood for the first time. He's selling a light, just a small half-circle tied to a three-inch wide solar panel. An older man tests it in his home, a tiny hut of tarp and tin built like the 30 others in this far north side slum settlement. A kerosene lamp flickers inside.
At a second home, Arun wields his 1,600 rupee ($29.48) gizmo for a woman seated with nine children. He points out the small cell phone charger in the light's rear. The woman turns inside, pulling out her phone to consult her husband.
She is one of millions in India and worldwide in a surreal contemporary fix: she owns a cell phone, but her home has no toilet or power line. The country's mobile users mushroomed in a few short years, reaching some 900 million. Cheap phones have not suddenly lifted owners out of poverty. But they have given them access to resources and economic ladders once unreachable.
Pollinate Energy's solar light Mark Bergen
Arun fails to sell any here, yet he will return tomorrow. The hyperactive 20-year-old is a salesman for Pollinate Energy, a social enterprise NGO that has, in the past five months, sold 400 private solar systems to slum dwellers in north Bangalore. Pollinate is one of a growing number of companies betting on "leapfrog" technology designed to help the urban poor in developing nations to skip right over fossil fuels for electricity.
On their first visit to a slum, the staff never make a sale, explains co-founder Monique Alfris. Residents are understandably skeptical of consumer goods in India. Though the panels pay for themselves in about 6 months, those making three to four dollars a day are reluctant to put down the 400 rupee ($7.47) installment plan payments.
And many are transitory, like the migrant construction laborers Arun visited, nervous of investing on land they could be booted from.
When the Pollinate Energy founders arrived from Sydney, they expected urban communities to prep them for rural markets, where far more people lack power. By some accounts, Bangalore was the second Asian city, after Tokyo, to be electrified. According to estimates, only 20,000 slum dwellers here lack electricity
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