Lighting up lives in Calcutta
Electricity Abroad In the latest report in our series on international electricity markets, Vincent DeVeau looks at Brazil's efforts to expand its generating and transmission capacity to make electricity available to all while simultaneously keeping pace with its expanding economy.
Rugby international and Lions star Gordon D'Arcy has just returned from visiting GOAL's pioneering solar light installation programme in West Bengal which has "lit up the dark lives of a remote and poverty stricken rural area in India, and reversed the community's fortunes," writes D'Arcy.
There is an enormous demand for rural electricity in India, with more than ten million families in India's four Eastern states still unconnected to the electricity grid. Constant energy shortages and blackouts are a common problem for those connected to the grid. In urban areas they face power cuts of up to 6 or 7 hours a day, with rural areas suffering blackouts for as much as 20 hours per day.
For the past three years, GOAL has been working in the Sunderbans region of West Bengal – which lies at the mouth of the Ganges, and is a three-hour drive from Calcutta, India. A desperately impoverished and isolated region, traditionally huge numbers of locals migrate to Calcutta where they typically end up living on the streets, destitute and homeless. I witnessed this eye-opening sight first-hand, following an invitation from GOAL's John O'Shea to see the work that GOAL are doing at the coalface of poverty in Calcutta, India.
Until recently, life would come to a grinding halt after sunset in these humble villages of 14,500 households (83,000 people) situated in the heart of the Sunderbans. Inside mud and clay homes, children used to study in the dim, smoky glow of a kerosene lamp. This all changed with the installation of innovative low-cost, energy-efficient lights that are powered entirely by the sun. Installed by GOAL through a partner Indian-based nongovernmental organisation, part of the programme focuses on bringing light to rural India, erecting lights near public places and community water sources, and in schools, hostels and households.
Along with building schools, and ensuring that residents have access to medical resources, GOAL hoped that solar lighting projects would make the island more appealing for the people of the Sundarbans in an attempt to stop them moving to the city and adding to Calcutta's population of marginalised hut dwellers, on the outskirts of society.
Millions of Indian households use kerosene to light their houses – a fuel which is dangerous, dirty and consumes nearly 4 percent of a typical rural Indian household's budget. And it causes the deaths of thousands every year. At €255 each, solar lights have been installed in nearly 300 homes to date by GOAL through a local partner.
GOAL's provision of solar lights in 18 primary schools and five high schools have seen an increase in school attendance, and girls in particular are now more willing to attend.
Before these lights, kids couldn't do their homework in the dark, and the teachers were generally uninterested in their work on account of the dark and dingy conditions they worked in. Children can now study at night time, elders can manage their chores better and life doesn't come to a halt anymore when darkness falls. EM
