Youth Taking Action: Shedding Light on Rural Innovation

by James Bach

category: Young Leaders

Published May 06, 2009 @ 07:19AM PT

Social entrepreneurs aim to help others with their innovations, but some actually start out trying to help themselves. That was the case with Shailesh Upadhyay, an Ashoka Youth Venturer in India. Growing up in a village without electricity, he struggled with finding a light source that could help him study at night. His solution involves tractors and a switch he invented that can connect compact fluorescent bulbs to tractor batteries.

We spoke to Shailesh and his teammate, Ujala Shanker about their work and how social entrepreneurs should innovate for rural needs.

1) Can you describe the design of your invention and where the idea came from? What was your inspiration?

I am from rural background and went to school in a village near Varanasi. I had a tough time while studying due to power crisis. Being asthmatic, I had to inhale toxic fumes of the kerosene lamp that worsened my health.

Due to lack of resources, I had to drop-out for a few years before joining college. Like me, many rural students struggle to progress in spite of their intelligence and enthusiasm.

As they say, "Necessity is the mother of Invention" and this experience gave me a great inspiration to device a solution. My experience in farming prompted me to think about utilizing the tractor battery as the power source.

I designed a circuit to tap into the tractor battery to power up one CFL at night, and implemented it successfully for my use. Later, when I started engineering studies, I discussed this idea with Ujala Shanker who was actively involved in rural activities. That marked the birth of this venture. We both dreamed of scaling this to more homes and tried the solution on 17 homes in Gurera village near Varanasi. To our delight, we were able to help 30 students study longer hours and improve their health due to reduction of pollution.

2) What are all the benefits of the Tractor Factor's eco-switch device?

The advantages of this system are:

1. Reduction of pollution by using CFLs instead of bulbs and lanterns: 240,000 liters of CO2 per month and 2,450,000 kJ of heat per month.
2. Improvement in academic performance of students, as they now have a light source to study after dark.
3. Better health for users by reducing Asthma, ENT and Eye problems.
4. Cost Savings
1. For farmers and rural students
2. Saves Govt. subsidy

5. Increased lifespan of tractor battery (For technical information please refer to point 5 from the following link; http://www.tatagreenbattery.com/BatteryTips.html)
6. We are currently exploring if the same solution can also help women in doing some activities early in the morning or late night such as milking the cows, using a comfortable light source.

3) What have been the biggest obstacles in implementing your innovation and how did you overcome those challenges? What are your future plans for The Tractor Factor?

We faced the following problems during implementation:

1. Villagers thought that using the battery for lighting CFLs will eat up the battery and reduce its life, as a result of which their tractors will be affected. On the contrary, tractor battery life is increased by at least 3 months due to regular use of the battery.

To convince the villagers, we gave them demos of the device and asked a technician to come and explain the advantages in terms of better battery life to villagers.

2. Some villagers were also very concerned about the safety while operating the gadget. They feared that they will get a shock while plugging in the wires.

Hence, we took some time in showing demos and practicals before we could finally convince the people that the gadget operates under 12 V DC which is safe for the human body.

This problem was especially faced while dealing with girls and women.

Our current plan is to implement this solution in 4 more villages. We plan to seek more funding and resources from other organizations so as to impact as many villages in India as possible, in the future.

4) Innovative grass-roots solutions can have extremely positive effects on communities, but in order to reach as many people as possible the ideas must be relatively easy to implement while maintaining low costs. Based on your experience how can social entrepreneurs meet these two needs?

Honest feedback is the key. Many times people try to impose new ideas on the community and ignore the suggestions of beneficiaries thinking, "Oh! What do these folks know about technology? We better stick to our plan..."

From our experience we feel embracing suggestions and communicating continuously with people who use or plan to use the gadget, is really important. Understanding the needs and affordability, and fine-tuning the solution are the key.

Secondly, being a good observer helps in identifying the difficulties and simplest ideas that could be of great impact. So yes, one should keep his/her eyes and ears wide open. :)

5) Looking into the future how do you foresee yourself continuing your social entrepreneurial work? Do you hope to take on other challenges that affect rural India?

Yes, Ujala and I are continuously brainstorming new ideas that can help the community. Our mentor, Mrs. Sandhya is also very passionate about rural issues and is supporting us in carrying out activities. As of now our primary focus is Tractor-factor but down the line we hope to evolve more business models that have a direct impact on community. After we are successful in 4 villages this year, we want to tackle many more villages next year. We also want to influence the tractor makers to incorporate the gadget into the tractors. We want to educate the rural youth so that they can carry our work forward, thus scaling it easily. Our long-term goal is to completely focus on entrepreneurship.

Get to know other young social entrepreneurs by reading their stories and seeing videos of them in action at http://genvcampaigns.org/

If you are a young person between the ages of 12-20 and want to create positive change in your community join the global movement of young changemakers at http://genv.net/