Watt's The Good Word

Heera recently bought a black-and-white TV and converted his mud-and-thatch hut into a one-room, pucca house with his new earnings. "I don't charge people for the electricity, but if the mill stops working, everyone has to pitch in for the repair costs," he says. Some water millers, however, do charge between Rs 10 and 20 per month for electricity, which is far cheaper than the monthly expense villagers incur on kerosene.

Upgrading water mills is not a very expensive proposition either. On an average, upgrading costs between Rs 38,000 and Rs 60,000 per water mill. This includes the cost of the iron for the new turbines, the fabrication cost and the cost of building a pucca structure around the water mill to absorb vibrations. Funds for upgrading have come from the department of science and technology, and labour is provided by the villagers. Gopal, a water miller at Lacchiwala village near Rishikesh, is into fabricating the new iron turbines and employs three people. At present, he is busy fabricating 15 iron turbines ordered by the army. "I have also been providing 3 KW of electricity to six houses in Lacchiwala," he says.

And now, the technology behind improved water mills may just be in demand for commercial purposes. Recently, an entrepreneur in Mussoorie, V.S. Rana, bought the technology, including an iron turbine, for Rs 40,000 to generate 5 KW of electricity for his leisure resort at Kempty Falls, a nearby tourist spot. "Although we had an electricity connection, the voltage fluctuated and power supply was erratic. So we decided to harness some of the water at Kempty Falls and set up a water mill to generate our own electricity," says Rana. The water has been routed through the water mill and eventually joins the falls. Although the water mill is experiencing teething trouble, it is designed to generate enough electricity to run seven 100 W lights and a refrigerator.

However, Joshi and his team are not too keen on exploring the commercial possibilities of their technological innovation. Rather, they prefer to continue upgrading water mills across the Indian mountains providing a necessity that successive governments have not been able to give to the villagers. "Our goal is community empowerment through technology that is affordable, feasible and can be repaired by those who operate it," says Joshi. With villagers lighting their own way, the hills will soon twinkle at night.