India

Vidya Sagar Devabhaktuni, SKG Sangha – biogas entrepreneur

[:en] Vidya Sagar Devabhaktuni, President, SKG Sangha Location: Bangalore, India “Human beings are divided, but their basic problems are all the same”   Having provided biogas solutions to over 10,000 villages since the mid-80s, Vidya Sagar Devabhaktuni has explored remote areas all over the world. For the president of SKG Sangha, exploring local cultures and …

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Raghu Chandrasekaran, E-Hands Energy – rural energy entrepreneur

[:en] Raghuraman (Raghu) Chandrasekaran, Founder E-Hands Energy Location: Chennai, India “Who cares for the poor anyway?” Along the Himalayan border of India, site of the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict, lie rural villages which Raghuraman Chandrasekaran has ventured into many times. The founder of E-Hands Energy, which brings hybrid solar and wind energy to rural Indian …

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Vishnu Raghunathan, Lytyfy – solar entrepreneur

[:en] Vishnu Raghunathan, CEO & Co-Founder, Lytyfy Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia “You have to really find quality products in a market which can be unfair.” After college, Vishnu Raghunathan and S. Deepak Kumar spent more than two years working for the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, a government programme in India’s rural Bihar province. The …

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Scaling up distributed renewable energy for healthcare in India

[:en] This month, Smart Villages and LCEDN are partnering with Power for All to bring you a webinar about the nexus between universal healthcare (SDG3) and universal electricity access (SDG7). As a follow up to our February webinar, “Healthy villages are smart villages”, we’ll ask – how does distributed renewable energy help to make villages …

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How will India install 10,000 micro-grids over the next five years?

Dr. Rahul Walawalkar, President & MD, Customized Energy Solutions India (CES) and Executive Director, India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) Harsh Thacker, Project Manager for MICRO, the Microgrid Initiative for Campus and Rural Opportunities, Customized Energy Solutions India (CES) Location: Pune, Maharashtra, India “Learning should not be proprietary; we have to learn from each other’s mistakes” …

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Greenway: Bringing cleaner cooking to rural India

Neha Juneja, Co-founder, Greenway Location: Mumbai, India “If you don’t experience a problem yourself, it’s not easy to solve it” There was a year in the early days of Greenway in India, where Neha Juneja and her two-co-founders were eating everything they were cooking on a traditional cookstove that each of them kept in their apartments …

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Profile: Shyam Patra, Naturetech – Winner, India

Describe an overview of your organization and highlight the vision you see way forward? Naturetech Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd. is a social enterprise building model villages based on holistic approach to rural development centered on smart solar AC micro grid infrastructure. Naturetech microgrids power village street lights, households, schools, water pumps and its grids can be …

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Profile: Arpan Mukhopadhyay , Naturetech – Winner, India

Brief biography Arpan Mukhopadhyay is a design engineer looking into the smart metering aspects of smart village initiatives of Naturetech Infra.  He is a newly passed out post graduate and is passionate about development of the weaker sections of society and protection of environment using technology. He  did his M.Tech in Power Electronics and Drives …

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Oorja: Turning farm waste into energy in Uttar Pradesh

Interview with Amit Saraogi, Co-founder and CEO, Oorja Location: Delhi, India “We will be able to strengthen local economic development, increasing demand for our solution and bringing jobs into the local economy” Amit Saraogi spent part of his childhood in Uttar Pradesh, playing amidst the rice fields where his family harvested rice paddy to be processed in their …

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Svati Bhogle, social entrepreneur and founder, Sustaintech

Svati Bhogle, social entrepreneur and founder, Sustaintech Location: Bangalore, India “Grow, but don’t spread yourselves too thin.” How long do you blend tea leaves with milk? Should you brew the tea for a shorter few minutes after that, or turn the gas off? When Svati Bhogle, a chemical engineer by training, went from one of …

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Bottom-up inclusive approach and more evidence of productive uses crucial for smart village success in South and Southeast Asia, concludes final workshop

Integrated ministerial strategy and micro-grid financing are other key issues identified by first global study of rural off-grid communities Bangkok: Delegates to the Smart Villages Initiative Closing Workshop for South and Southeast Asia in Bangkok March 7-9 agreed that a bottom-up approach involving villagers themselves is essential to catalyse energy access and spread its resultant …

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Smart Villages in India

Brian Heap talks with Ashok Mangotra, former Joint Secretary to the Government of India in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). They discuss the Indian government’s aim to electrify all villages by the year 2020. Since 80% of energy in rural areas still comes from biomass – how will the transition to clean …

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TR7: Energy and agriculture for smart villages in India

The concept of the “smart village”, as developed by the Smart Villages Initiative, is that modern energy access acts as a catalyst for development—education, health, food security, productive enterprise, environment, and participatory democracy—which in turn supports further improvements in energy access. In the global context, energy access can provide a much needed driver for sustainable economic growth and development for …

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ONergy: India can’t rely on coal – it must go renewable

A computer centre powered by ONergy solar technology.

Interview with Vinay Jaju Co-founder and COO at ONergy, Head at Switch ON “Energy is not the end. It’s just the means to the end”. Vinay Jaju’s interest in environmentalism first got serious while he was working in Australia and got involved with local forest conservation efforts. When he returned to India in 2008, he …

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WR27: Smart Villages in India – State level insights

The discussions in both state-level workshops in India discussed in this report revealed that the biggest gains from an integrated sustainability solution for the smart city-smart village linkage would be to address the challenge of youth unemployment in both rural and informal urban communities. The introduction of disruptive technologies that generate the opportunity for rural youth to learn new skills—installing and maintaining rural …

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d.light founder: Solar can leapfrog the grid for people living at the “bottom of the pyramid”

Interview with Ned Tozun Co-founder, d.light, a for-profit social enterprise based in China, India, East Africa, and the USA Location: Nairobi, Kenya “Now that the technology has evolved, we want to provide more holistic energy solutions”. After studying and working in engineering, Tozun knew he was “wired” for entrepreneurship. He started “a couple of companies” …

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