Purpose

To have electricity is to have peace. In this context, peace comes through the elimination of poverty, for without its elimination people live in fear of the future.   This type of fear arises from in-access to socioeconomic opportunity, health facilities, and other sanitary infrastructures, which are all necessities for human beings to function. Thus, electricity itself is a fundamental necessity and a right that should be due to all people in this 21st century because of the immense transformational change that it promises.

Najafgar Bhoshal Vipauji (NBV) consists of 100 households, located in Uttar Pradesh (UP) which is the most populous state in India, with over 250 million people, and constitutes a part of the approximately 44% of all rural households without electricity. Typically NBV natives use locally crafted kerosene lanterns, which emit large amounts of poisonous soot, as an alternative lighting means. Although dim, the school children use these lanterns to study and do homework at night, and use the daylight to learn at their respective schools. Consequently, due to the constant soot inhalation and fire outbreaks from tipped over lanterns, incidences of deaths are more pronounced in NBV than other villages in Uttar Pradesh, accounting for a huge part of the annual state average of 30,000 deaths. NBV has no nearby clinics, as clinics are located several miles away closer to sources of electricity further compounding the vulnerability to health risks that NBV natives face. 

The natives live on less than Rs. 315 ($7) per month per capita and have kerosene as the second demand for income after food. And although the Indian government allocates food grains and subsidized kerosene to NBV, neither allocation is sufficient—the three liters of subsidized kerosene households received is barely enough to fuel one lantern for 3 hours a day or two lanterns for less than 2 hours. 

Therefore, without electricity the village lacks the necessary infrastructure to reduce its own poverty through economic development. And although Micro Grid Power (MGP) would provide a ready solution to sustaining solar panels system in NBV, the village lacks the resources and is too unsuitable of a market with such a low population for MGP to consider placing the solar panels without outside funding. This is the reason we come in.