Little drops of water
Little grains of sand
Make the mighty ocean
And the beauteous land

Little deeds of kindness
Little words of love
Make our earth an Eden
Like the heaven above

These are some wonderful lines which I remember from a poem read during my school days..

The solution to the power shortage in India is not the nuclear deal with US, where we end up with loads of radioactive wastes to be managed and play second fiddle to the US foreign policy and compromise our strategic and military assets, but it is little drops of water like the one mentioned below.

Tiny water wheels = Mighty hydro electric power station

Anil Joshi, a botany professor in the north Indian state of Uttaranchal, revived and redesigned the traditional gharat, i.e the water mills used in the villages. These water mills are powered by the downstream water and are traditionally used to grind wheat, rice etc.

Now the same gharat after a small redesign costing about 10,000 Rupees per upgrade, is also generating hydro electricity at the same time! An impressive 5 kilo watt of power per Gharat!

A Gharat

A silent revolution has swept inside the villages of north India in the last decade. More than 1000 villages today in the Garhwal region of Uttaranchal are generating their own electricity using these water mills! There are about 150 Gharats that have already been upgraded resulting in about 1,50,000 people having access to electricity.

Can you believe that these villages which did not even have an electric bulb some time back, today are having their own movie theaters :)

About 500,000 water mills exist today in the entire Himalayan belt of north India spanning from the north eastern states to Kashmir, and the work is going on to upgrade all these water mills as power generating stations too. Note that this is absolutely clean power generation with zero pollution and almost zero maintenance!

Once we have all the water mills or gharats upgraded in these states, the result will be 2500 mega watt of power (which is about 2% of the country’s ENTIRE power requirement!), and this would also provide employment to about 1.5 million rural youth and generate earnings of over 1200 million rupees per hour! All of this at Rs 10,000 per Gharat as an upgrade cost.

Read this, In September 1995 at Manali in Himachal Pradesh when the entire region was in the grip of floods and houses were in darkness ( bcos of power failure ), the only lights were on at Simon Woolvet and Paula Chaudhuri’s house. They had upgraded their water mill, which produces 5kW!

What a wonderful experience it is to generate, the entire power required to run your home, at your home itself! Home made electricity, no dependency on government power supply and no power failure as long as the water continues to flow nearby

As I have been always saying, the real India lives in the villages of India, and this is the real hope to build a strong developed nation, a true superpower (and not a US subordinate).

Compared to most of the urban youth who wastes his time in pubs, bars and discotheque, eats a lot of junk and then runs inside a gym, and then always crying and complaining about lack of opportunities and corruption, he is literate (but is uneducated, always driving with a high beam in his vehicle), is feared of lay offs, is sometimes insecure, rarely self employed etc

On the contrary, look at the confident self sufficient, self employed, innovative rural youth and the wonderful way they are creating opportunities for themselves out of problems! The one mentioned here is just a small example, there are hundreds of such innovative stories from rural India.

So now, I would like to define lack of opportunity NOT as a lack of availability, but ACTUALLY as a lack of creativity. So my dear urban youth, instead of crying about a stronger rupee taking out your offshored jobs, try to get a bit creative and move ahead

Watch the related news video about Gharat here. Man revives old grain miller and produces electricity

And do not forget to read more about it here