The village of Dharnai lies on highway 83 between Patna and Gaya just past Jehanabad on Patna-Gaya road 83. The project was funded by Greenpeace and was inaugurated in the summer of 2014 by the former (and future) chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar. Nitish’s speech is summarized in THIS article form the International Business Times. Nitish said that "Solar energy is the only solution and I praise and appreciate Greenpeace for accepting the challenge in successfully installing this everlasting viable solution model."
After the speech, I went to the inauguration and walked around the village with some local journalists. What struck me most when I walked through the village was that for many residents of Dharnai there was profound skepticism and discontent about the project. The farmers said that they wanted "real" electricity and not whatever Greenpeace had installed. As I probed further, I realized that what the residents of Dharnai meant by the demand for real electricity was that they wanted electricity like they saw in nearby towns that ran for more hours per day and more importantly was able to power high-load equipment especially electric motor pumps for lifting groundwater for irrigation. The village was not that far away from the grid (in fact you could see the high powered transmission lines from highway 83 that runs directly past the village). It was perfectly reasonable for the villagers to wonder then why they were left with a type of electricity that could only power a light bulb or a fan and that would only for a limited number of hours a day when electricity that could benefit them substantially more was literally visible from their village.
A few days later, I learnt from a journalist/friend of mine that soon after the inauguration of the solar mini-grid , the villagers raised enough discontent that the government got nervous and extended the actual electric grid to Dharnai, making the entire project relatively low-value.
I later asked an ex-employee of the project in Patna why Greenpeace had not build the mini-grid somewhere father from a major highway and major transmission lines—somewhere that was unlikely to get connected to a major grid for 5 to 10 years. The main answer was that putting the project in a more remote village would make it a poor demonstration site for politicians and donors to visit if it was not easily accessible. I sort of get that, but at the same time, its a poor place for these people to visit if the project is not successful.
Follow-up
Several months after the inauguration, I returned to Dharnai to speak with farmers after the media and public attention had largely subsided. It was clear the that project had never completely materialized. On a sign at the entrance to the village there is a list of the achievements of the project which included both the three mini-solar grid substations and 10 solar irrigation pumps. Around the village there were several other signboards advertising the rates that villagers would pay for access to the grid. However, as we quickly learned, only 1 of the advertised 10 solar irrigation pumps had ever arrived in the village. Only a minority of the villagers were hooked up to the solar mini-grid and paid the monthly connection fees. Most had found a way to illegally steal electricity from the electric grid which the government had extended to the village—probably soon they felt the government would force them to standardized their connections to the electric grid and they would have to pay for their electricity, but they still preferred that to the solar mini grid.
Another interesting thing I later heard from someone involved in the project is that Dharnai has three separate solar grids and solar power stations because the upper-castes in Dharnai which is comprised of three separate tolas (hamlets) refused to draw their power from the same solar power station as lower caste villagers. I cannot verify this account beyond a single source, but it does speak to the many challenges of bringing solar projects into fruition. These challenges are often overlooked by excited development practitioners keen on the benefits of solar energy to solve rural energy challenges “sustainably”.
Lessons Learned
A big lesson from Dharnai is that bringing solar to solve energy challenges in rural areas is a political as well as technical challenge. Solar has many advantages--individual villages can pursue micro-grids thereby bypassing the inability* of the State to expand and maintain a power grid that reaches most of Bihar's rural areas. It also reduces greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from coal power plants. Solar powered irrigation pumps bring perhaps even more benefits to farmers as they give them access to groundwater at a significantly reduced cost than the diesel which is the only alternative where grid power does not reach.
However, solar energy at least to date cannot do all the things that grid connected energy can. Farmers want to be able to power lights, watch the TV and do other activities at any time they want to rather than only when the sun is shining and for a few hours after that. I understand the excitement of the international community to “leapfrog” rural India over fossil fuel technologies directly to energy systems that do not generate greenhouse gases and threaten future generations, BUT we must be extremely sensitive I think to asking some of the poorest people in the world (Bihar’s rural poor) to shoulder the burden of decreasing global greenhouse gas emissions when available technologies that would contribute substantially to their immediate well-being (albeit while negatively impacting the future) are widely available. The villagers made this point loud and clear to their government after Nitish came to the village and the government was embarrassed into extending the grid, negating many of the benefits of GreenPeace’s project.
Update 2018:
I recently came across this masters thesis on the solar project in Dharnai: file:///Users/agh736/Downloads/jawaid_eqra.pdf
* Views differ a great deal on how soon Bihar's rural areas will have more access to grid-power. See a recent landscaping of views on electrification in Bihar by The Energy Collective at MIT: http://theenergycollective.com/pjlevi/2205931/uncertainty-grid-expansion-and-grid-supply-case-study-bihar-india
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