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National Geographic : 2015 Nov
Contents
80 national geographic • November 2015 Networks. A for-profit company with a name derived from the notion of “simple payments,” Simpa offers subscription plans structured to fit the budgets of low-income consumers. Even so, the equivalent of roughly 35 cents a day is a massive expenditure for Mandal, who sup- ports his family on a razor-thin budget of less than two dollars a day. Food costs money, as do schoolbooks, medicine, and tea. His middle son, who’s 15, fell ill late last year, and the hospital bill plunged the family into debt exceeding $4,000. Nevertheless Mandal says that spending 20 percent of his earnings on Simpa’s services is bet- ter than living so much of his life in total dark- ness. “I was spending that much to recharge a battery before,” he says. “I would walk about one kilometer back and forth up the road to recharge it. Sometimes battery acid would spill and burn me. One time it spilled and burned right through the fabric of my pants—all for power.” Mandal’s struggle is replayed in villages in Myanmar and in Africa, where private compa- nies are selling people solar units and panels and building solar farms. The International En- ergy Agency estimates that 621 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity. Be- cause of insufficient power lines in India, only 37 percent of the nearly 200 million people in Mandal’s home state of Uttar Pradesh use elec- tricity as their primary source of lighting, ac- cording to 2011 census data. Simpa calculates that 20 million households there rely mainly on government-subsidized kerosene. Through- out the small farm towns, mobile phones are charged using tractor batteries; hundreds die of heatstroke each summer, when tempera- tures can soar to 115 degrees Fahrenheit; and rashant Mandal flips on a candy- bar-size LED light in the hut he shares with his wife and four children. Instantly hues of canary yellow and ocean blue—reflecting off the plastic tarps that serve as the family’s roof and walls—fill the cramped space where they sleep. Mandal, a wiry 42-year-old with a thick black beard and a lazy eye, gestures with a long finger across his possessions: a torn page from a dated Hindu cal- endar, a set of tin plates, a wooden box used as a chair. He shuts down the solar unit that powers the light and unplugs it piece by piece, then car- ries it to a tent some 20 yards away, where he works as a chai wallah, selling sweet, milky tea to travelers on the desolate road in Madhotanda, a forested town near the northern border of India. “My life is sad, but I have my mind to help me through it,” Mandal says, tapping the fraying cloth of his orange turban. “And this solar light helps me to keep my business open at night.” Mandal, whose home sits illegally on public land at the edge of a tiger reserve, is just a tiny cog in a surging new economic machine, one that involves hundreds of companies working aggressively to sell small solar-powered units to off-grid customers in developing nations to help fill their growing energy needs. Roughly 1.1 billion people in the world live without ac- cess to electricity, and close to a quarter of them are in India, where people like Mandal have been forced to rely on noxious kerosene and bulky, acid-leaking batteries. Mandal’s solar unit, which powers two LED lights and a fan, is energized by a 40-watt solar panel. Sun beats down on the panel, charging a small, orange power station for roughly ten hours at a time. Mandal leases the kit from Simpa P By Michael Edison Hayden Photographs by Rubén Salgado Escudero
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