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| There is an enormous gap in the fuel and energy demand and their supply and its availability in India and in particular the state of Maharashtra. The cost and the availability of electricity and Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) have gone beyond the reach of the rural poor. Most rural households continue to use traditional fuel sources such as fuel-wood, kerosene and agro-waste to meet their energy demand. |
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At the outset WOTR has initiated renewable and alternate energy initiatives. The objective of this unit is to make available renewable sources of energy to address the domestic energy requirements (for cooking and lighting) of rural households. Our ultimate goal is to make a village smokeless and to provide for the cooking and lighting needs to every household in the villages selected.
Three watershed project villages (Naralewadi, Aundhewadi and Wanjarwadi) were selected initially in different areas with different socio-economic conditions. The technologies used were biogas plants with attached toilets, biogas lights and solar home lighting systems. Of the three villages selected one village has been very successful and WOTR has constructed biogas plants with attached toilet and installed a biogas lights in 30 of the 34 households in the village.
Also every household in this village have a solar light installed, thereby completing the objective of creating a model village WOTR had set out to achieve. In the other two villages 5 biogas plants with attached toilets and 118 solar lights have been constructed and installed respectively.
Based on this experience, awareness generation and mobilization is being done and the idea is catching up in other villages too. Micro finance and differential pricing schemes are also being used as a tool to enable the poorer sections and others to avail these technologies. Through this support, over 1,100 solar lamps have been provided to the poorer families in Sampada villages and around 633 solar lights have been installed in WOTR villages as of date.
 A new stove has been designed and developed by WOTR based on bio-gas technology. It will use biomass pellets manufactured out of agro-wastes as a fuel source. This stove is in the initial stage of implementation. Around 400 stoves have been provided to rural households in Sampada villages (Ahmednagar district) and there is great demand for the same.
In most parts of Maharashtra rural households still use traditional fuels (kerosene, cow dung and fuel wood) for their domestic energy needs. The sources of energy – MSEB electricity supply and LPG - used by urban areas are beyond the reach of the economically weaker section of rural Maharashtra. The electricity supply is provided for 12 – 14 hours at best and the LPG supply is poor and too expensive.
Just to illustrate the enormity of the problem, consider the following numbers – on an average each rural household of 5 to 6 members use 5 litres of kerosene per month and 3 kgs of fuel wood daily. This translates to 60 litres of kerosene and 1,095 kgs of fuel wood per year. Now multiply this with hundreds of thousands of rural households and we can only begin to see the bigger picture.
In this year alone WOTR / Sampada has electrified more than 1,700 rural households in its project areas and plan to provide 5,000 homes in the next 6 month with alternative cooking stoves to replace the hazardous traditional fuel wood. Let's look at a few numbers again – even if we can reduce the traditional fuel usage by 65 per cent in these rural households, we will save at least 66,300 litres of kerosene and 3,558,750 kgs of fuel wood per year.
WOTR has been working with the renewable energy for over a year. Change and impact is seen at each individual household level. Here the positive impact these technologies have had on the education of a rural child or the effect they have on the health and drudgery of rural women, convince that these technologies have to be implemented on a much larger scale. These technologies not only impact the lives of these rural households we serve but also the climate in the city we live and the very air we breathe.
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