India’s “barefoot engineers” light up the world. From Ms Magazine:
Neither Satyanarayan Sinha nor the four women he introduces as his team look like adventurers. Dressed in clean cotton clothes that have seen better days, they might be a group of peasants in any rural Indian village. And, indeed, they work out of the village of Tilonia, bordering the desert of the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, a place where life includes smoky wood fires, poor-quality drinking water and other hardships imposed by climate and poverty. But these women are used to transcending their circumstances: They are “barefoot solar engineers” who bring solar-powered light to rural India.
For example, during a trip they took to the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, they cut their way through dense jungles, venturing into remote areas where no government official would go. There, the team trained two women chosen from each nearby village at a workshop in the city of Hyderabad-trainees who in turn taught others in their villages to construct and run solar energy units. One hundred batteries, hung on long poles, were carried through the 20-kilometer-long mud paths to the main post office servicing the region’s villages, and that became the battery pickup location. More:
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