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I m happy to welcome a new contributor on this blog. After Cecile Pompei, who is now business development manager of Barefoot Design (www.barefootdesign.com, more details to come soon!), Manon Delachenal took some times to give a feedback about an interesting experience we had together last week, during a field trip with Selco. Selco (www.selco-india.com) is a major distributor of energy solutions in Karnataka and Gujarat. It mainly provide solar solutions, but has also started an experimentation in cookstoves with Prakti.

We spent some days with us, observing first deployment of cookstoves. Manon on her side was finishing a one year tour of the world. After an experience in carbon finance management in France, she decided to take time to meet, share, identify... carbon related projects from south America to India. Prakti was her last mile. With the support of Geres and it new carbon finance alliance Nexus, Manon spent 1 month with us. She made a tremendous job to support us on the identification of carbon finance opportunity and it led us to be much more focus on forest and local environmental issue. But that s another story! Let s go back to our visit with Selco in Bommalapura, 50km south of Mysore, a village 100% electrified by solar solution, thanks to Selco skills and rural banking finance!

All following text is from Manon. Thanks! And all feel free to send me your contributions!

Led by Prassana from Selco, we take a bumpy bus to reach a village called Bommalupura.

This village of 32 households is situated at about an hour away from Mysore, in an area where the main economic activity is the cotton cultivation, on which rely the revenue of the surrounding villages. On the road we also pass along tobacco fields, coconut and bananas trees, well protected with electrified fences from the elephants leaving in the neighborhood.
While approaching the village, we can “admire” nice poles coming from the electrical grid… However, Bommalupura has never benefited from the electricity until 8 months ago, despite the fact that line are coming above the houses of the village!

That’s when  Selco has decided to install solar panels in order to electrify the village. Each household was offered the possibility to get one 15 watt  panel model. It means roughly 4 hours electricity per day, enough power to light 2 lamps and feed one battery.
People were offered to benefit from a loan. Indeed this dramatical change has a cost : around  9000 INR that people obviously can’t pay at once, especially in a context of irregular income due to cotton crops. The loan was set up together with the KalpataruGramina Bank, whose senior manager, Mr Raghavendra was one of the first to launch Self Hep Groups in India.

People have to pay 150 INR ($3) to reimburse the loan, each week during up to 5 years. Interest rate depends on the reliability of the family and the guarantee of their incomes, but are between 9,2 to 19%. They are also offered insurance health as nothing is organized from the Indian government on that matter.
However, flexibility with the payment has been set up, especially according to the harvesting season and periods when don’t get any revenues and can postpone the reimbursement for later.
It madeit possible for people to save money from buying the kerosene for the lamps they used to use, and make them able not to go to  bed at 6 pm when it gets dark…
On top of that, this village also got the chance to get a Prakti stove for free. The stove is the LEO stove, single pot (see www.praktidesign.com).