Magsaysay Award-winning social entrepreneur Harish Hande’s firm Selco is giving low-cost solar lamps to the poor in Karnataka
Forty-two-year-old Marappa lives in one of the lanes ofSadiq Nagar of Chitradurga district in Karnataka. A construction worker, heearns around `2,500 a month. It is never enough, he says — not for all hisnecessities. But it is not always dark despair for him, quite literally. Aftertwilight, he flicks a switch for white light from a solar lamp. For the nextfew hours before he retires to his bed, Marappa has no worries about light.There are 32 houses in his locality that have low-cost solar lamps keeping thedark out.
“The solar lamp is a boon for me,” says Marappa. That these33 houses have no access to grid electricity is a grim reminder of how most ofIndia is under-served, despite the country madly grabbing at economic growth.
So, when Marappa, someone so far off the radar of technologyor governance, uses the lamp with ease and talks of it as the most everydaymarvel, one is intrigued. How did the lamp get to him and the others? Behind itall is Harish Hande, a Bangalore-based social entrepreneur, an engineer bytraining and the recipient of the 2011 Magsaysay Award in the EmergentLeadership category. In 1995, Hande set up Solar Electric Light Company(Selco), a low-cost energy company, targeting the rural poor.
His interest in energy solutions goes a long way back — bornin Handattu in Karnataka’s Udupi district and raised in Rourkela, Odisha, hejoined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, for a graduate degree inenergy engineering. He later completed his master’s and earned a PhD fromUniversity of Massachusetts, Lowell. During his master’s, he had a keeninterest in large solar projects. An interaction with a professor, however,changed the course for him. The professor told him about the poor in DominicanRepublic, a Caribbean nation, who purchased solar power at affordable rates.Hande’s interest piqued and he toured the country in 1991. Suddenly, herealised that the poor back home in India could be such a market. A couple ofyears later, he submitted a doctoral research paper titled ‘Ruralelectrification in India: Does solar make sense?’
Returning to India in 1994, Hande set up Selco with seedgrants from Neville Williams, who had founded the non-profit Solar ElectricLight Fund (Self). Over the last 18 years, the outreach model has evolved as asustainable energy solution for the off-the-grid rural poor.
Today, sales figures show that the adoption of low-costsolar power is a paradigm shift waiting to happen. Selco has sold 1,20,000units in Karnataka alone, directly benefitting almost four lakh people. Butsuccess hasn’t come easy. “When I started out, people kept telling me that Iwould fail,” says 45-year old Hande. His stakeholders are poor people who havenow demonstrated that they can use and maintain technology.
Hande has a slew of national and international awardscommending his work. Apart from the Magsaysay, there are the Ashden Award forSustainable Energy (monikered the Green Oscar) that he received in 2005, the2007 Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year award and the KhemkaFoundation award. But he sees these only as entry passes to government offices,he says, half-joking. “Awards get me meetings with government officials,” henotes with a hint of irony.
Hande’s plans for Selco and outreach are ripe with theendless possibilities that lie unexplored at the prosaic ‘bottom of thepyramid’. He is eyeing outreach in two of India’s less-developed states –Odisha and Bihar.
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