Part 16 (1/2)
In the village of Trisingadi Sodha, members of the local water users' a.s.sociation, the jal sabhaa”village elders with gold earrings and brilliant turbans of red, white, yellow, and purplea”garlanded us with oleanders and daubed our foreheads with vermilion. We walked with them to a large pond, perhaps a hundred yards across, which collected rain that was channeled from a jagged line of sandstone hills five miles away. The pond held enough water year-round for 10,000 people. One of the men pointed out a flock of migratory Siberian cranes poking around in the muddy shallows on the far side. Later, as we sipped sweet masala chai, the elders brought out their records for inspectiona”dog-eared notebooks with minutes and decisions from their monthly meetings, signed in neat Hindi script or with thumbprints, careful entries of money spent and received. Some of the jal sabhas charged monthly fees to water users, Harish said. Others sold it by the tankerful. This income financed the necessary maintenance, with each village devising its own systema”posting a guard by the pond, for example, to keep away would-be defecators, or perhaps training a young man to keep the pumps and filters in good working order.
”It's a challenge to get the women involved,” Harish said. ”This is still a very feudal area.”
”But what about you?” I asked.
She twinkled. ”For most of these communities I've ceased to be a woman. They think that I'm a man.”
Something significant was happening here, it seemed to me. The jal sabha was blending traditional principles of community organization with a newer entrepreneurial spirit. In the process, India might ease some of the historic tension between village and city. Gandhi believed that the village was India's beating heart; Nehru, the first prime minister after independence, thought its future lay in the cities. Here was a way to maintain the integrity of the village while building the modest, incremental prosperity that might make it unnecessary for people to migrate to places like the slums of Okhla.
This was not the only way in which Gandhi's vision was being updated. Forty miles to the south, in the straggling village of Roopji Raja Beri, a surreal sight confronted us. I recognized the flattened foil dome, which somewhat resembled a silvery mushroom cap, from Harish's PowerPoint slide. It looked as if an alien s.p.a.cecraft had set down among the sand dunes, but it was a ”water pyramid,” only the second of its kind in India. The technology was Dutch; a team of engineers had come here for six weeks to install it, and the inauguration ceremony had taken place just five days earlier.
The entrepreneur in charge was an imposing, barrel-chested villager named Prem Ram, a twenty-year veteran of the Indian army. He said that the water shortage in Roopji Raja Beri had grown so severe that people had come to blows. The groundwater was so salty that you could literally burn your tongue, and there had not been a decent rain since 2003. ”The natural order is breaking,” he said.
Prem Ram seemed as proud of his pyramid as he was of his military service. He opened a vent for me to look inside, but a fierce surge of heat and humidity drove me back before I could catch more than a glimpse of the glittering pool of fresh water. The strange structure used the power of the sun to function as a combined distillation and desalination plant, he explained. And since it ran entirely on solar energy, the operating costs were close to zero. The brackish groundwater was pumped in from a nearby holding tank; once inside the pyramid, it was distilled through evaporation. He thumped a meaty fist on one of the sloping sides, and s.h.i.+mmering streaks of fresh water ran down the interior walls. The salt that was left behind provided an added source of income for the villagers, who subsisted otherwise by selling the milk from their scrawny herds of cattle, goats, and water buffalo.
One day, if the costs of the technology come down, if the government bureaucracy becomes more efficient, if the high-tech entrepreneurs from Hyderabad and Bangalore put up the start-up capital, there may be other strange sights here in the Thar Desert: gigantic solar farms, perhaps, each one capable of feeding as much power into the national grid as all the new dams on the Ganga. But it will be equally important for India to think small and local and to focus on the entrepreneurial village culture that is emerging in obscure places like Trisingadi Sodha and Roopji Raja Beri. To Americans, living off the grid may imply a hair-s.h.i.+rt lifestyle choice, a yurt among the Oregon redwoods. To Indians, paradoxically, it may be a pathway to the national mainstream.
Let There Be Light.
”Turn left at the monkeys,” Sumant Dubey said to my taciturn driver. We were 200 miles north of the water pyramid now. We drove another five minutes or so along the highway, dodging homicidal Tata trucks, until a narrower road turned off into the scrubby Aravalli Hills. At the intersection, a large, dusty lot served as an informal truck stop, and hundreds of monkeys were rooting around for sc.r.a.ps and handouts.
I had been introduced to Dubey, a cheerful, round-faced young man, a few days earlier in Delhi by Leena Srivastava, executive director of The Energy and Resources Inst.i.tute (TERI). Headed by Rajendra Pachauri, the n.o.bel Prize-winning chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, TERI is an unusual hybrid of scholars.h.i.+p, science, policy a.n.a.lysis, and gra.s.sroots activism. It has its own university, and its labs specialize in off-the-grid renewable energy technologies.
There are still 400 million people in rural India without access to electricity, Srivastava said, and progress was slow because the government insisted on trying to meet their needs by the conventional means of extending the national grid. ”We're still throwing good money after bad,” she said. ”It's easy enough to set up the infrastructure, even with our monetary constraints, but it's much harder to actually get the electricity flowing through the wires. So distributed generation is something that we need to pursue very aggressively.”
We'd been joined now by Dubey's boss, Akanksha Chaurey, an expert on solar photovoltaics. ”People are beginning to recognize that a better way to go is the smart mini-grid and micro-grid,” she said.
I asked her what she meant by this, and she said, ”Multiple small-scale, interconnected power plants in rural areas, serving isolated communities. They may generate power by solar, or small hydro, or bioma.s.s. Solar is the easiest, although it's also the most expensive.”
What Srivastava said next echoed Kanupriya Harish's point about creating sustainable connections between rural India and the economic mainstream. ”In the last two or three years we've proven that if you provide people with the energy they need to run their businesses, you can create new linkages, things like agricultural retail networks where rural people have direct access to urban markets,” she said. Take refrigeration: 60 percent of fresh produce is lost before it gets to market; provide affordable electricity, and the local economy can be transformed. The key, she explained, was to identify entrepreneurs, or ”franchisees”a”individuals who are known and trusted in their communities, who can make sure that the business model is sound, that the bills are paid, that those miniature power plants remain in good working order. It was much the same vision as that expressed by the jal sabhas in the Thar Desert, only this time to provide energy rather than water.
Chaurey told me about a new TERI program called Lighting a Billion Lives. The name seemed stunningly ambitiousa”a billion lives?a”but that didn't seem to faze her. It did, however, raise the question that bedevils any local initiative in a country as vast and complex as India. Can it be replicated? In the jargon of development, is it scalable? The water-harvesting structures in the desert were designed to be scalable in horizontal fas.h.i.+on, so to speak. A solar pyramid creates fresh water; villagers from miles around come to see how it works (these days they may even hear about it by cell phone), and they want one too. The model that TERI was promoting worked vertically as well as horizontally: not only did you show the villages what worked, but you showed the government too, and Srivastava said that on a good day it might even sit up and take notice.
Lighting a Billion Lives was launched last year at a ceremony in which Rajendra Pachauri presented Prime Minister Singh with a hand-held solar lantern. The gift was rich in symbolism: it took the power of the sun and the large vision of international climate science and linked them in one direction to the national government and in the other to India's 638,365 villages, all through a simple device that would illuminate the humblest hut in the Aravalli Hills of Rajasthan. The only question was, how would people afford it? Even a solar lantern costs about $80, more than most Indians earn in a month.
Dubey, who was responsible for the implementation of the program in Rajasthan, told the driver to follow the narrow blacktop that branched off the Jaipur highway. We pa.s.sed through a small town, kept going for a few more miles, then turned off onto a one-lane dirt road, and finally b.u.mped along a narrow, rutted track of dried mud until we reached a two-story concrete house at the edge of a field of wheat and gram, the following season's worth of chapatis, parathas, and nans. The house was modest enough, but by the standards of the hamleta”one of several that make up the village of Badgujran, which has 5,000 peoplea”it was a mansion. The paunchy, middle-aged man who lived there was the most prosperous person in Badgujran, as well as its solar entrepreneur. He introduced himself as Mahavir Singh.
I asked him why his fields were so greena”a rarity in Rajasthan. He removed the cover of his deep tube well, where a rope descended into unfathomable darkness. Five years ago it was 250 feet deep, he said; now he had to go down 800 feet to reach water. It hadn't rained in eight months; the monsoons had ended several weeks earlier than usual. In the old days, wells like these were excavated by gangs of lower-caste workers who charged 150 rupeesa”three dollarsa”for every foot they dug. Now a truck came with heavy equipment and did the job in a day. But it was expensive. A well like this costs two lakh rupees (Indians count in lakhs, multiples of 100,000, not in millions). Four thousand dollars, in other words, making the tube well something that only the wealthiest farmers could afford. Poorer ones had to sell their land or leave it uncultivated and work for men like Singh as field laborers.
I was surprised to see that the village had some half-hearted electricity poles, although many of the wires were trailing on the ground. The power reached only four or five houses, Singh said, though others had strung up illegal wiring to feed off the current, as poor people have done since electricity was invented. But the supply was dependent on the whims of load-shedding, when a utility shuts down secondary lines like these during hours of peak demand. In Badgujran, that meant that the juice might start to flow at useless timesa”at ten at night or four in the morning, while the village slept. And most people couldn't afford it anyway. As Leena Srivastava had said, putting up the infrastructure was the easy part.
Until this year, that left no option but kerosene lamps, still the basic source of light in 68 million Indian homes. Village huts have uneven floors, no windows, walls full of holes and cracks. Kerosene lampsa”usually no more than a bottle with a crude wicka”burn black and smoky. Children knock them over, the wind blows them down. Smoke inhalation and kerosene fires are among the leading causes of child mortality. Furthermore, Chaurey had told me, in terms of the intensity of carbon emissions, kerosene is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Lighting a Billion Lives is TERI's alternative; the program is now up and running in thirty-three villages in Rajasthan and is expanding rapidly nationwide.
A young woman named Sunita took me up to the roof of Singh's house to show me how it worked. Like many Rajasthani women, she was a walking rainbow: orange sari, lime green scarf spangled with silver, bright bangles and earrings, fingers and toes painted with intricate patterns of henna, a cherry red cell phone. She showed me the small array of solar panels, which stood next to a stack of dung cakes that had been laid out to drya”the traditional cooking fuel of village India. A tangle of wires led to a charging station in a small room downstairs, where rows of lanterns, some yellow and some green, were hooked up to chargers. Each lantern will hold a charge for six to eight hours.
What made the idea so attractive was the financing model, Dubey said. With solar power, whether it's a single lantern or a 5,000-megawatt array, the biggest obstacle is the initial cost. Part of the production costs of TERI's lanterns is underwritten by a variety of often surprising corporate sponsors, including GE and Coca-Cola. As the program expands, the unit price will come down, but for most villagers the lanterns will still be out of reach. So TERI's solution is fee for service: rentals, not sales. Each village would have a charging station run by a local entrepreneur, who would rent out the lanterns for a couple of rupees a daya”pegged to the amount an average family would otherwise spend on kerosene.
Mahavir Singh led me along a narrow path through the fields to a cl.u.s.ter of mud-walled houses and a small white temple. Green parakeets raised a racket in a large neem tree. There were several small holes around the base of the tree. Singh said they were cobra dens. About ten villagers are bitten every month, but most are cured by a holy man who lives nearby, with a poultice of neem leavesa”highly prized in traditional Ayurvedic medicinea”and hair from a cow's tail.
We came to a hut where three or four scrawny goats had their faces stuck in a feed bowl and a bad-tempered water buffalo strained at its heavy metal chain. The woman of the house invited us inside. Some children's T-s.h.i.+rts hung on a clothesline. The wall was covered with pictures of Hindu G.o.ds and gurus. Next to them was an Iberia poster that showed an airplane taking off over a chalet hotel in the Alps and a row of motorboats at anchor on a sapphire lake. The inspirational motto on the poster said: DON'T WAIT FOR YOUR s.h.i.+P TO COME IN, SWIM OUT FOR IT.
”The solar lanterns allow people to do many things,” Dubey said. Women gathered in the evenings to discuss health and family issues; the embroiderers and carpet makers in a nearby hamlet were working longer hours and making more money. This woman's two sons were sitting in the glow of a lantern on the mud floor of another room. The thirteen-year-old, Ajay, was using the lamp to do his English homework.
It was dark now, and Singh had switched on his own lantern to guide us back through the snaky field. As we stood outside his house, making our goodbyes, I noticed something I hadn't seen earlier. He had water, he had energy, and now I saw that he also had the third element of prosperity: mobility, a car. An entry-level Tata Indica hatchback, to be precise. He said it was the only one in the village. I couldn't imagine how he had brought it here, along that potholed track.
I asked if he had heard of the Tata Nano, which was scheduled to be unveiled in Mumbai at the end of March and was already making headlines around the globe. At one lakha”$2,000a”it would be the cheapest car in the world, and it would get more than fifty miles to the gallon. Some people said it would usher in a car-owning revolution. I asked Mahavir Singh if he might be interested in a Nano himself. He thought about it for a while but seemed skeptical. ”Perhaps,” he said. ”But I'd need to see it first.” A sentiment that many Indian environmentalists have echoed, albeit for different reasons.
The Man from Siam.
Back in Delhi, I stopped at a newsstand and picked up a copy of Auto India. There was nothing in there about the Nano: Tata Mo tors was keeping its new baby under wraps for another couple of weeks.
Otherwise, Auto India looked much like any other car mag: reviews of the new E-Cla.s.s Mercedes; glossy gatefold ads that said things like Smooth. Suave. Sure. The ber-Cool Is Here. So when I went to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) to meet its director, Dilip Chenoy, I pretty much knew what to expect: lots of guy talk about sound systems and leather upholstery and zero to 60 in 5.9 seconds.
Instead, Chenoy started talking about milk.
”My favorite image in India is the milkman,” he said. ”He used to walk to your door with four bottles. Then he developed a carrier, so he brought eight. Then he came on a bicycle with two big drums. Then he progressed to a motorbike, with four drums, and then a small pickup truck with even more. From there to a larger truck, and then the mother dairy bought a big refrigerated truck. In the process India went from being the fifteenth-largest producer of milk in the world to being the largest. And without that s.h.i.+ft in transportation you would not have been able to realize the dream.”
He intended this as a parable, obviously, and it served as the prelude to an impa.s.sioned speech about India's development goals and the social benefits of greater mobility, ticking off the environmental pros and cons of various forms of private and public transportation.
”We have more than a billion people but fewer than a hundred million motor vehicles on the road,” he began. ”So our challenge is to figure out the most economically viable way of providing mobility, so that people can get to school, find employment in rural areas, become entrepreneurs. And it has to be sustainable in terms of emissions. That's what we're trying to do here, and the private car is only part of it.”
Even though car owners.h.i.+p might increase, he wanted to put the numbers in context. He said, ”There are fewer cars in India than Detroit producesa”or used to producea”in a year. So the scale is totally different. And the primary use of a car here is for the service economy. As you will have seen, the cars here are loaded with stuff.”
I asked why there was such a wide variation among Indian cities in ”mode share”a”the percentage of travelers using different kinds of transportation. I picked three cities, more or less at random, from a chart I'd been given by Partha Mukhopadhyay, a transportation expert at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi. All three were about the same size, close to 2.5 million people. In Kanpur, 16 percent of pa.s.sengers travel by car. In Jaipur, the figure is 8 percent. In Nagpur, it's 3 percent. It depends to a large extent on the availability of public transportation, Chenoy explained, and that sector has historically been neglected in India. The term is also too narrowly defined, he added. ”There's this mindset that public transportation equals a forty-two-seater bus. But it may also be a car, or a small van, or an SUV.”
Presumably he'd seen me wince at the mention of SUVs. Too polite to sneer at my American preconceptions, he explained patiently that SUVs in India are generally not sold to highway hogs and soccer moms; three-quarters of them are sold in rural areas, where they may be used to haul goods, to take village kids to school, or as a ”para-transit” option to compensate for the absence of buses. And Indian SUVs, made by companies like Tata and Mahindra, are subject to increasingly stringent fuel efficiency and emissions standards. The SUV as instrument of social progress and friend of the environment: an arresting notion.