“We need to demystify solar energy,” says Prof. Chetan Singh Solanki, who aims to convince one lakh families to surrender their electrical connections and go off the grid on October 2, Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary. On the same day, at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi, he will help 10,000 students make solar study lamps.
The solar man of India, as he is known, was in Kochi to officially launch Suryakranti — All India Solar Challenge — a race of solar cars scheduled for September 2020. Solanki, who teaches at IIT Bombay and is the founder of Gandhi Global Solar Yatra (GGSY), was inspired by Gandhian teachings of local self-sufficiency and sustainability to work on Energy Swaraj. His mission is to create a global movement around solar energy awareness. How did he hit upon solar energy? His PhD guide directed him to work in the field, saying it had great potential to solve the problems in society.
Solanki’s trigger was a 2015 report about how most solar street lights in India did not work. He also found very few success stories on of decentralised solar solutions. He began to think of localising solutions to problems — of training communities to generate, consume, maintain and manage their resources locally. So he founded SoULS: Solar Urja Through Localisation for Sustainability, which aims to provide solar study lamp to every child in rural India as part of ‘Right to Light’ mission. Invoking Gandhiji’s teachings that training should use the hand, heart and head, he has conducted workshops for 132, 000 students. By October 2, this year, Solanki plans to train one million students across the world as Student Solar ambassadors.
Solanki is aware that the Solar Lamp initiative will spread awareness but cannot solve people’s energy solutions and so launched the Gandhi Global Solar Yatra last year. “The answer lies in going back to Gandhi, to Gram Swaraj(village self rule)— be locally self sufficient in needs of food, governance, economy and therefore self sufficient in energy. As Gandhiji is a world figure, I thought that I should take his universal appeal and ideas on sustainability around the world.” He has so far visited 30 countries and aims to connect with people in 50 cities as part of this initiative.
Solanki believes that Energy Swaraj will solve many problems and enable every community to generate and fulfil their own needs. “No amount of government funding or projects can solve the problem on its own; the people have to be involved.” So far Solanki has reached out to 6.3 million families, 40,000 villages and has brought almost 9000 women into the network. “On October 2, therefore I want 100,000 families to surrender their electrical connection and go completely off the grid,” he says. He will also release his book, Energy Swaraj: My Experiments with Solar Truths, on the same day.
Apart from this, Solanki also conducts classes on Health and Happiness. “I teach breathing. Many people don’t realise how powerful Yoga and breathing are,” he says adding that one has to be disciplined in life, even in energy consumption and that Gandhian principles are the only form of sustainability.
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