The problems of poor are like never ending horizons of an ocean. Beginning from basic necessities of life up to social security, everything is unaffordable for them. Around the island of enterprises in the developing world, there is ocean of poverty. Lots of organisations as well as individuals are fishing out of this ocean in the name of charity and development. But still the there are more addition in poverty than deaddition. Since last 5-6 years the globe is experiencing a golden era of technological development in both IT and non-IT sector. Developing countries like India are also not far behind in the race, rather in some sector, they are far ahead of developed countries.
But how many percentage of the global population are well accessed to these technologies??
The answer is very very negligible portion because, the hi-fy technology is not able to address their day to day problems and even some are able to address some of their problems, its never the less a dream to afford these technology for the poor people.
Still there are lots of grassroot level innovations in technology, which are coming out from the problems itself and are well equipped to address the basic day-to-day problems of the poor household. Unfortunately thousands of these technologies are coming and dying due to lack of required finance to promote these. Sometimes it’s the approach, which prevents the technology to make a sustainable reach to the end users. There is a need of support from institutions, Govt. and public to make these innovations successful and sustainable, so that our society can be a better place to live. The lack of grassroot experience and the institutional willingness are some of the major obstacles to make the technology accessible to poor.
We (SELCO Solar Lights Pvt. Ltd.) are trying to promote the innovations in technologies, which are meant for addressing basic household problems which includes, lighting, cooking, drinking water, sanitation and many more. Our main objective is to make this globe a better place to live in, using alternative source of energy. The difference is, we don’t believe in charity, we believe in provide fee for quality service, which can lead to better income generation activities for the end user. This approach of us has been successful in making the service chain and technology promotion sustainable for ever, not putting extra financial burden on the end user.
As a part of this effort, we are promoting a new cooking technology, innovated by some students of “Colorado state University”, US. The device is called starlight stove which generates electricity when cooking food on it. It’s a normal cookstove, equipped with a thermoelectric generator, charge converter, battery. When we cook food on the stove, using the regular bio-mass fuel, the heat passes throught the thermoelectric generator and the battery gets charged, which we can use for further lighting or using a small electronic equipment. The calculations are as such. , If you burn the stove for four hours, it can light a 5 W CCFL for 3 hours.
Now four of these stoves are under demonstration at four poor households of Gujarat, who are also clients of SEWA Bank. As a part of technological innovation and creating a sustainable service chain of it, SEWA bank is partnering us under the name of “Project Urja”. Objective of SEWA is to provide better technological solutions to their client. Role of SELCO is to provide these solutions in a better financial package which can lead to a better business model as well as enhance income generation of the end user. SEWA bank is their to finance to end users for the product and ensure a productive use of the technology using their huge and strong network.
The Starlight Stove seems to be very energy efficient and multi beneficial, which can be effectively used at the road side fast-food vending shops for a better solution for cooking and lighting. The demonstration is going on, so we expect better results out of it, so that it can be replicated elsewhere in the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment