Summary: Tiny, stand-alone power plants are powering village after village in India with rural folk willing to pay what it takes for assured electricity.
The year: 2004. The movie: Swades (Hindi for homeland). Shah Rukh Khan is playing the character of Mohan Bhargava, a non-resident Indian space scientist in the US. On a trip to meet his grandmother in India, Bhargava is appalled by the living conditions in her village, Charanpur, set in the plains near a river. The crowning moment, three hours into the film, for Bhargava is when he builds a reservoir across a stream to run a small turbine that generates enough electricity to light bulbs in the forgotten village.
The Khan-starrer was not a blockbuster, but had quite successfully highlighted how effective such micro initiatives can turn out to be. Today, there are several Charanpurs cropping up across India, as startups, NGOs, villager groups and, even, large companies turn to standalone power plants to light up villages that are either not connected to an electricity grid or have not-functioning power lines running through them.
Less than a year after Swades hit the screens, NTPC, India's largest power generating utility, commissioned a 10 kilowatt (KW) biomass plant at Jemara, a small village in central Chhattisgarh, lighting up 100 households there. In the five years since then, lighting up remote villages without access to grid power has become a big part of NTPC's corporate social responsibility programme. The utility has set up 11 projects with a cumulative capacity of 231 KW and covering about 1,780 village homes. Five more projects with a combined capacity of 110 KW are poised …
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