As cattle roam outside in the scorching heat, Sapni Surin perches on a stool inside a sunlit workshop fixing parts onto a small circuit board. Colorful wires, tiny resistors and tools are scattered around.
“I think everything is right,” she quietly says as she holds the circuit board above her head.
Ms. Surin is among 20 women who have traveled to Tilonia – a small village two hours’ drive from Jaipur, the capital of the desert state of Rajasthan – to learn how to build and install solar panels. The training is part of a program to address India’s chronic power shortage.
At least 400 million Indians – more than the population of the U.S. and U.K. combined – don’t have access to any form of electricity, according to the World Bank. Ms. Surin, who married a year ago, is one of them.
She is from the mineral-rich eastern state of Jharkhand. Despite coming from a region with huge coal reserves, Ms. Surin is used to relying on firewood to cook and a kerosene lamp to see in the dark.
The shambolic nature of India’s energy infrastructure was exposed last July as much of the country experienced one of the worst power outages in history.
In Tilonia, Ms. Surin and her classmates sit around a worktable. Some chat in Hindi, others in their local dialect. They are interrupted when their thin, male teacher, standing in front of a blackboard resting on a window sill, asks them to read aloud the color codes they must memorize to identify different electronic parts.
The six-month training program is run by Barefoot College, a non-governmental organization. In March, 20 women from Jharkhand finished their training, while Ms. Surin’s batch will study through to December.
Bunker Roy, the founder of Barefoot College, and his colleagues travel to remote areas without electricity and pick the students themselves. For the Jharkhand program, the state government gave Barefoot College a list of remote villages off the grid. The college chose to work in Manoharpur Block in West Singhbhum District. Here, 40 women from 20 villages were selected for training.
A woman looked at a solar panel.
“We watch and observe the various women in the community. We look for confidence and some raw guts, and we see how they are regarded in the community. In the end it becomes clear which women should be sent to carry this responsibility,” said Meagan Carahan Fallone, head of global strategy and development at Barefoot College.
Ms. Surin had never left Jharkhand before.
Since 1989, around 460 uneducated Indians, including 200 women, have learned how to install, operate and maintain solar-powered lamps, cookers and other devices. As a result, around 20,000 households have been electrified, according to Barefoot College.
The organization has also trained women from 52 other countries, helping to light up about 1,100 villages housing 350,000 people worldwide, it says.
Santosh Devi, 21 years old, became a solar power engineer in 2010. She is now her family’s breadwinner. She installed solar panels on her one-story cement house in her village in a semi-arid part of Rajasthan beyond the reach of the national grid. She helped install panels in other homes in the mainly low-caste village too.
Ms. Devi spends time in her workshop repairing solar systems while many other women in her community work in the fields.
As dark monsoon clouds gather over the village, she remembers what it was like without electricity. “When we used our kerosene lamp during a storm it wouldn’t work. Now, no matter how heavy the rain, our lights won’t switch off.”
After initially offering training to men, in 2005 the NGO decided it would only teach women. Mr. Roy said it is easier to teach women than men in rural India, partly because they are seen as fixed assets of village life; less likely to leave in pursuit of work in urban areas. When the college trained men, they would often use their new skills to get jobs in cities.
“Having had mixed success with men we studied the impact women had on their communities with the same training and realized it was far more profound, less transient and had the possibility of addressing many other powerful challenges facing rural women,” Mr. Roy said.
Barefoot College has a 19-acre campus in Tilonia. This year’s program for the women from Jharkhand is being partly funded by India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, which has provided $45,000 for training, Barefoot College says.
The Jharkhand state government has also donated $333,600 for equipment, while Geneva-based Oak Foundation will provide a grant of $350,000 and another $159,200 is coming from private funding, Barefoot College says.
This is intended to help light up over 2,000 homes in 20 villages in Jharkhand.
For Barefoot College, equipment provided for each household, including solar panels, a solar lantern, LED wall lights and a charge controller, costs around $350.
“The equipment we use is not very expensive and is made to be repaired and maintained by these women. That’s the key to its long term viability,” said Ms. Fallone.
“I think the potential for solar energy in India is endless,” she said.
Around 57% of India’s electric power capacity comes from coal, according to the Central Electricity Authority. The government wants to reduce its reliance on coal and create environmentally friendly alternatives, including solar, which accounts for less than 1% of the total energy supply.
Under a national program launched in 2010, India said it plans to produce 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022, up from around 1,466 MW today.
Coal is killing Indians too. A report published by Greenpeace in March estimated up to 115,000 people in India died in 2012 due to air pollution from coal power plants.
Life in the remote village of Kasiapecha, where Ms. Surin lives, comes to a halt as night falls. It’s the same for thousands of other villages across India.
Ms. Surin will return to Kasiapecha toward the end of the year. Her job will be to install solar panels on homes in her community and pass on the knowledge she has learned to others.
“I’m looking forward to people calling me an engineer when I go back,” she said.
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