Towards Sustainability: Stories from India 54 From Darkness to Light Developing renewable energy sources 16 Bounded by the River Pampa on one side, and the dense Sabarimala forests on the others, Thulapally in Kerala was till recently fairly cut off from the rest of the world. Agriculture is the mainstay of the local economy. The land holdings here are small and marginal. Animal husbandry is practiced as a supplementary activity. Farms are mostly of the homestead type, and houses are scattered across the village. Most of the domestic fuel needs are met by fuelwood. The Malanadu Development Society (MDS) is a local NGO which has been working in this area for some time. Thanks to MDS facilitation, a 12 km stretch of road, and two major causeways across the rivers have come up. All of this has helped in the development of the village, but the community continued to feel the lack of electricity, as Thulapally was not connected to the main grid line because it was quite far away from it. It was in the late nineties that the people of Thulapally requested the NGO to help them do something about getting electric power for the village.   Technical personnel of the Society surveyed the village and, on the basis of their study, felt that it would be possible to generate electricity through a micro-hydel project here. This suggestion was discussed at length with the local community. After several rounds of discussion they were convinced, and a local Committee was set up for the implementation of the project. Several sub-committees were formed to look after specific aspects like organizing people, collecting materials, etc.   Financial resources came largely from UNDP under the Small Grants Programme. The community too contributed. As the project beneficiaries were identified at the beginnning of the project, it became easier for the MDS to seek their contributions for infrastructure, labour and other materials required for the construction activities in the project. Coconut posts were provided by the people to function as lamp posts. The project got on steam, and within 50 days, people had power! 146 houses were given connections, as also 10 shops and establishments, and five institutions. Each house was allowed four Compact Fluorescent Lamps. Besides, 25 houses were given power for television sets. Electricity was to be supplied for about six hours everyday, and a charge of Rs.50 (US$1)per household with 4 lamps was fixed. The generators have a total installed capacity of 20 KW. Overnight the quality of life in the village changed. Quite apart from the immediate benefits, several long-term benefits are anticipated: a positive impact on the health of women, because of their reduced exposure to smoke; long-term impact on educational attainments of the children of the village, who can now pursue their studies more easily; and reduced dependence for firewood on the nearby forests . Power to the People

Leapfrogging Technological Change 55 The management of the project is entirely in the hands of the local community. The technical upkeep and maintenance of the generator is done by a trained local youth. If there are problems in the distribution system, they are set right by the local electrician. There is a General Body of all power consumers which makes the policies and is the final authority. The General Body elects a nine member Executive Committee which looks after the management and administration of the project. If replication is the test of success, this initiative is indeed successful. In nearby Moolakayam village, 28 families now have electricity generated through a similar initiative. In far-away Idukki district, a similar micro-hydel project has been put up, benefitting 51 families. Small and mini-hydro power projects which have the potential to provide energy in remote and hilly areas, where extension of the grid system is uneconomical, is one of the thrust areas of the Government of India. By 2001, 420 small hydro power projects (up to 25 MW station capacity) with a total capacity of over 1423 MW, had been established in the country. Commitment to renewable energy sources is strong in India. As far back as 1981, Government of India set up a Commission on Additional Sources of Energy (CASE). A year later, a separate Department of Non-conventional Energy Sources (DNES) was created in the Ministry of Energy. A decade later, DNES was upgraded to the level and status of a Ministry, reflecting the government’s resolve to give a thrust to the renewable energy movement in the country. This has earned India the distinction of being perhaps the only country in the world to have an exclusive Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources. One of the world’s largest programmes on renewable energy technologies is being implemented by the Government of India. The objectives of the programme include: supplementing power generation from conventional fossil fuels; providing electricity to rural and remote areas; making energy available for  a variety of applications in villages; providing improved cooking stoves and biogas plants; and recovering energy from urban, municipal and industrial wastes. Besides these, exploitation of chemical sources, geo- thermal energy and ocean energy is also envisaged. A Renewable Energy Policy Statement is under formulation to give the much needed thrust to these programmes. Thrust on Renewable Energy Managing Methane Satia Paper Mills, Muktsar, Punjab was generating large amounts of organic waste, including methane, as a result of its manufacturing process. They were also using 20 tonnes of rice husk per day in their boilers, leading to substantial emission of greenhouse gases. The conventional effluent treatment system was not able to meet the norms set by the Pollution Control Board and the mill was becoming economically unviable.   In 1997 the mill switched to a technology which provided a solution to both its effluent treatment and energy requirement problems. As part of the UNDP- supported ‘Development Of High Rate Biomethanation Processes as means of Reducing Green House Gases Emission’ project being implemented by the Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources, an Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket Bioreactor was installed at the mill. The reactor uses the organic waste from the mill to produce biogas. The biogas is used in the boilers, resulting in net saving of operating cost of the mill. The use of rice husk is also avoided which further reduces its emission levels. The new technology has meant 45 per cent reduction in Chemical Oxygen Demand and around 80-85 per cent Biological Oxygen Demand reduction. This technology can be used in a variety of production processes where organic waste levels are high, including leather factories and tanneries, dairies, confectioneries, food processing units and breweries.  Started in 1994, the US $5.5 million MNES project is serving not only to control emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas, but also its utilization as a clean fuel.  The project aims to provide technical assistance and institutional preparation for formulating a national strategy for biogas generation and utilisation, in introducing, demonstrating and standardizing a wide variety of technologies, and in bringing about an awareness amongst policy makers, waste generators, and others.

Towards Sustainability: Stories from India 56 Lighting Ladakh Fuelling Rural India The thrust on non-conventional sources has been of particular relevance to remote, rural areas. Ladakh, a cold desert, is one of the most arduous and remote areas in the Himalayan region. For six months of the year, Ladakh is nearly cut off from the outside world by snow, o and temperatures may plunge to minus 50 C. People have to travel two days on foot to fetch   kerosene from the nearest Government depot. But use of solar energy through efforts of the Social Work Research Centre (SWRC), an NGO, has changed the scenario.   The installation of 532 units of solar home lighting systems in twenty-five villages has not only saved the villagers the arduous journey to get kerosene, but has also helped in substantial saving— both of expenditure incurred directly on kerosene by the community, and in terms of subsidies provided by the government. With solar energy lighting, not only has the quality of life of the people improved greatly, but each family is also saving upto Rs.720 a year (US $22) which was being spent on kerosene earlier. The Government saves nearly Rs.200,000 (US $6,312) annually, by not having to supply subsidized kerosene to these villages, and in addition 100,000 litres of diesel for convoys of trucks to carry kerosene from Srinagar which is over 400 km away. The initiative has also provided local people a vocational opportunity in the upkeep and repair of solar systems. Twenty-eight year old Tsewang Bordu of Digger village in Leh District is a typical example of a `barefoot solar engineer’ who has taken up solar energy installation as a vocation. Bordu now confidently installs, repairs and maintains solar photovoltaic units. This project is part of a UNDP-assisted programme for demonstration of a community- based solar energy system for sustainable development. The programme is being implemented by SWRC, through the Council for Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technolgy (CAPART). The programme aims to demonstrate community-based solar photovoltaic systems in seven unelectrified and remote village clusters in the states of Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Assam and Sikkim. Community- managed revolving funds are being created to contribute to the financial sustainability of the installed systems. The National Project on Biogas Development (NPBD) aims at setting up of family-type biogas plants.  These units not only provide fuel for cooking purposes, and organic manure to rural households, but they also mitigate the drudgery of rural women, reduce pressure on forests, and improve sanitation in villages by linking toilets with biogas plants. The nation- wide figures for implementation of the project are quite impressive in that more than 3.4 million families have biogas plants, and 33 million rural households use improved cooking stoves. Funding support has come from several sources. In many states, various rural development schemes are used for this. In some cases, Members of Parliament have utilized funds available to them under the Members of Parliament Local Area Development (MPLAD) scheme, for such programmes in their constituencies. Community participation has been the key for implementing this programme. The involvement of NGOs and local bodies has helped in successful penetration and

Leapfrogging Technological Change 57 implementation. In the eastern state of Orissa, for instance, the programme is implemented through Gram Vikas, an NGO. At several places, villagers were initially sceptical of using this technology because they thought that the cowdung would lose its fertilizer value after the ‘gas’ had been taken out of it. It took several demonstration activities, and persuasion by the rural volunteers of Gram Vikas to motivate villages to adopt this new technology. The intensive campaign was quite successful. Between 1984 and 1994, around 55,000 plants were constructed in over 6,000 villages spread across the state. Thousands of windmills rotate silently, as the wind whistles through the coconut trees, pumping nearly 450 MW of electricity into the south India grid. One of the largest wind farms in the world, Aralvoimozhy, close to the southern tip of India, is a major success story today not only because of the  use of a renewable energy technology, but also in demonstrating the manner in which distributed generation can transform the economy of a backward area. After 1990, an investment of nearly Rs.2,000 crores (US $400 million) was made in the area, which has stimulated the economic activity of Nagercoil district and the neighbouring Tirunelvelli district. The residents of Aralvoimozhy have benefitted immensely from the wind rush, as employment opportunities arose in their backyards. In the Aralvoimozhy site, private developers have set up clusters of windmills which function as independent projects within the wind farm, to produce 450 MW of energy.  This has been possible due to the measures adopted by the Government of India and the state government to encourage  investor-friendly policies for promoting privately-owned electricity generation from wind farms. India has been a pioneer in the field of renewable energy applications. Different sources of renewable energy are being developed with the aim of fulfilling the policy vision to bring about a smooth transition from the present fossil-fuel based economy towards an  economy based on sustainable renewable energy sources. A Windfall