Dr H. Harish Hande—SELCO
The Impact
SELCO creates low-cost customized lighting solutions for the poor. Photograph courtesy SELCO
SELCO has reached 80,000 clients across Karnataka and Kerala and has recently moved into Gujarat. 65 to 75% of the organization's clients are small farmers earning between USD 2–4 a day, and individual households earning USD 3–5 a day. The other 10 to 15% of clients are more middle income at USD 8–13 a day. Solar electrification has led to better education outcomes for children who can now study at night, and increased livelihoods of night-time vegetable vendors. The reliability of a PV system is a major benefit where electricity normally fails an average of four hours a day. Another benefit is the avoidance of dirty and dangerous kerosene lamps. For the environment, the 80,000 systems deployed avoid emissions of approximately 24,000 tones of CO2 equivalent per year that would have been released by the use of kerosene lamps.
The Entrepreneur
“Can you tell the poor to not cut wood or to not use kerosene? Sustainable energies like solar are solutions for both poverty and climate change. Does that still make solar expensive?”
Dr H. Harish Hande
Dr H. Harish Hande is the managing director and cofounder of SELCO-India. He is an engineering graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and he earned his Doctorate in energy engineering (with a solar specialty) at the University of Massachusetts. Harish originally started his PhD thesis in heat transfer. When visiting the Dominican Republic, he saw areas with worse poverty than India that were using solar energy and decided to shift his academic focus. Upon returning to Massachusetts, he flung his heat transfer thesis into the river. He then started anew on solar electrification in rural areas and conducted much of his research in India, Sri Lanka, and the Dominican Republic. He is widely recognized as an expert in the field of renewable energy and has received the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy in 2005.
