The grassroots efforts to bring solar panels to rural areas without electricity, while large-scale solar panels are being built across the country.

This story was produced and published by National Geographic through a reporting partnership with the United Nations Development Program.

Dungarpur, India, married at 13 and became a mother at 16. Rukmini Katara and her husband once ran a small grocery store in a village near Udaipur in Rajasthan. Like millions of rural women in India, she hopes to follow a familiar path: do what her husband's family asks her to do, sacrifice any personal ambitions, and devote herself to family responsibilities. But Katara has become a spokesperson for efforts to ignite the solar revolution in Indian villages.

Katara, 34, is the CEO of Durga Energy, a company that produces solar panels and employs about 40 women, many of whom have never graduated from high school. The company was established with the help of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and Rajasthan governments and has sold more than 300,000 solar panels since its factory began operations in 2017.

Most people went to Dungapur, a small town near Udaipur and its surrounding families, businesses and institutions. The town where Durga Energy is located is only a few blocks away from the main road of the town. One solar installation that Katara is particularly proud of is a set of panels that can power a well in a nearby village. It saves dozens of women the work of manually fetching water every day.

"When we started, we never thought we could get what we had in these four years," said Katara, who often smiled brightly when she spoke.

Durga Energy’s solar panels sold so far only meet a small part of the region’s energy needs, but it is hoped that manufacturing operations like it will incentivize similar businesses in rural and urban India to realize the transition from coal-fired power generation to solar power throughout the country. . By hiring rural women without technical education, the company also wants to prove that tackling the climate change crisis can also achieve other important goals, such as empowering women and boosting the rural economy.

“When solar panels are produced locally, people will buy them locally, and the funds will circulate in the local economy,” explained Chetan Solanki, a solar energy expert and professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. Solanki helped found Durga Energy and a similar company called Udaan in rural Maharashtra. These are the only companies of its kind in rural India, but Solanki hopes this concept will spread.

"Solar technology-when it becomes affordable and produced locally-will enable communities to become self-sufficient in energy," he said.

As the world's third-largest carbon emitter after China and the United States, India can play an important role in responding to the climate crisis. The country has been affected by the devastating consequences of climate change, with extreme weather events such as droughts and hurricanes becoming more frequent and severe. For example, in 2020, Hurricane Anpan ravaged West Bengal and Odisha, displaced millions of people and caused billions of dollars in damage.

At the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised that the country will achieve carbon neutrality by 2070, 20 years later than the goal set by the United States and 10 years later than China— -But it is still a big step forward for India. The country has pledged to reduce emissions per unit of GDP by 45% between now and 2030. By then, India plans to increase its renewable energy capacity from today's 134 GW to 500 GW, meeting half of its projected energy demand. If the plan is successful, it will be an extraordinary achievement.

The country has established 42 solar parks across the country, one of which is located in Bhadla, Rajasthan, covering more than 14,000 acres of desert with a capacity of more than 2.2 GW-the largest facility of its kind in the world. However, India is also continuing to build coal-fired power plants with a lifespan of several decades, which indicates that the country is expected to rely heavily on coal to meet its energy needs for a long time to come.

Solanki's idea of ​​promoting solar entrepreneurship in small towns and villages aims to end this dependence more quickly. This may also be a boon for nearly 25 million rural households in the country who lack electricity.

Rukmini Katara's journey from a rural grocery store to CEO began about ten years ago, when she founded a small cooperative bank with women in the village to provide members with small loans. In 2016, she was hired by Solanki to help distribute solar lights to more than 40,000 households in Dungarpur and adjacent areas. These lights are designed to help children study at night.

When Katara first needed to go out of the village for a two-week training, her husband told her that she couldn't.

"I went anyway. I didn't bring my phone, and I told him I was going to leave everything behind," she recalled. Two days later, her husband called her supervisor and asked to talk to her. "Have you forgotten me? Don't you want to talk to me?" He asked her softly. "After that trip, he never stopped me from going anywhere," Katara said.

When IIT Bombay gave her the opportunity to become a solar energy entrepreneur, she was ready for this role, and her husband was also very supportive. Nearly 300 women from the village applied to join the enterprise. The Rajasthan government allowed the company to convert an abandoned school into a factory, and a telecommunications company provided funds to purchase manufacturing equipment.

After two written examinations and one interview, about 40 candidates were selected and received a six-month training. In the factory, some workers are tasked with testing solar cells, the basic components of solar panels, which the company buys in bulk from suppliers. Others are responsible for welding welding wires to individual cells and arranging them in rows and columns determined by the panel design. The cells are then welded together and laminated in glass.

The output power of the solar panel ranges from 2.5 watts (enough to power a single LED bulb) to 10 watts, and can run a desk fan, computer or TV. Generally, households here choose devices with a capacity of 20 to 100 watts to partially or completely meet the moderate energy needs of small rural households.

"My family is proud that I am the only person selected nearby," said Asha Katara, an employee of Durga Energy. She said her father-in-law met with Rukmini Katara, who is not related, before his approval. "He was very impressed with her," she said. "My in-laws told me that we will take care of your daughter when you go to work."

In other more remote areas of India, such as the mountainous Ladakh region, where some villages are not connected to the grid, solar energy is changing lives, said Paras Loomba, who runs a company that organizes travel expeditions to make a social impact . Loomba was inspired when traveling to Antarctica, quit his engineering job, and found a way to combine his passion for outdoor activities with a desire to make meaningful changes.

After founding the company in 2013, Loomba began walking to the villages of Ladakh, which were not found on Google Maps, and installed solar panels with the help of tourists who were willing to pay for the experience. In some cases, they installed panels for a single household; in other cases, they installed a set of panels to serve multiple households.

Loomba wants the community to invest in maintaining this infrastructure, so he asks them to create a fund that every electrified household pays every month. "If there is any problem with the power grid," he told the residents of the village, "you have to pay the local service engineer so that the electricity in your village can continue to run."

After the first few trips, Loomba began to receive messages on WhatsApp from people who shared photos of other villages in Ladakh and other parts of India that needed electricity. Some of the people who participated in these trek with him quit their jobs and started working with Loomba. In the years since, his company Global Himalayan Expedition has taken the lead in installing solar power grids in more than 100 villages in Ladakh. The company recently started installing solar power grids in remote villages in Meghalaya State in northeastern India.

Both tourism-funded solar installations and local manufacturing can prove to be effective in illuminating areas outside of India where electricity is still unavailable.

"For example, in some countries in Africa, the electrification rate is still in the range of 50% to 60%," Solanki said. "The local manufacturing model can provide electricity to people in rural and remote areas with low investment and the least amount of time. Time I call it the energy produced by the locals for the locals."

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