IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2016 - 12

hands-on lessons. After six months
at the peaceful campus in the
northwestern state of Rajasthan,
the new technicians will return
to their home villages, bringing
with them solar power equipment
and know-how. They'll install solar
panels, charging stations, and
small LED lights in houses, and
they'll stand ready to deal with
breakdowns. While these systems
offer only the most basic amenities of modern life, they also bring
independence from India's dysfunctional national power grid.
The program initially enrolled
men, but these students proved
disinclined to return to their villages once they had marketable
skills. When the school began
recruiting grandmothers instead,
the program took off. As of 2015,
the college's g raduates have
brought light to some 20,000
houses in more than 300 villages
across India, Barefoot administrators say. This very literal campaign
of rural empowerment shows the
untapped potential of women who
are often passed over, says program manager Gloria Jonathan.
"These women may be illiterate,
but that doesn't mean they're
uneducated," she says. "They
have skills and they have intelligence."
The Barefoot College believes that
such women can solve a very big problem. In India, 240 million people don't
have access to electricity, according to the
2015 report India Energy Outlook, from the
International Energy Agency-and that's
a low estimate. A 2014 World Bank report
put the figure at 300 million people. Yet
the founder and director of Barefoot College, Bunker Roy, doesn't sound daunted.
His school's decentralized and off-grid
approach to providing electricity is "the
only answer" for India, he says. "Mahatma
Gandhi said the ultimate solution for fighting poverty in India was not mass production but production by the masses," Roy

MaR 2016

nORTh aMERICan

lIghtIng Up lIveS: At
a "night school" run by the
Barefoot College [above],
kids who work on farms during the day learn by the light
of a solar-powered lantern.
Women such as Jansya Devi
[photo at right, seated on left]
come to the Barefoot College
from villages that don't get
electricity from the national
grid. After training, Devi will
return home with solar panels, lights, and the skills to
keep the systems running.
Even in New Delhi, electricity distribution [top right] is
a messy business. Barefoot
College offers off-grid solar
solutions [bottom right].

says. "We have to apply the Gandhian
model to solar-electrifying villages."
India's government, however, has
a very different plan. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi has pledged to give every
citizen access to electricity by 2022. To
meet this deadline, the government
plans to rely heavily on solar power-
but not off-grid projects run by local people. Last year, the Ministry of New and
Renewable Energy announced an ambitious goal for building utility-scale solar
facilities, including "ultra mega solar
power projects" of 500 megawatts each,
and establishing grid-connected rooftop
solar projects in cities. With these two
components, the government aims to

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reach 100 gigawatts of installed solar
power capacity by 2022.
Many experts are frankly skeptical of
the government's ability to reach this
goal, given that installed solar capacity
in 2014 was less than 4 GW. Such a rapid
scale-up will be "very difficult to achieve,"
states a report by Bloomberg New Energy
Finance, adding that the 100-GW goal
may be more "aspirational" than realistic.
The International Energy Agency report
agrees, listing challenges relating to land
acquisition, solar panel manufacturing,
and finances. The report projects that by
2020 solar capacity will reach only 40 GW.
How the country solves its electrification problem is a pressing concern

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