My first week with Selco

It’s been a full week with Selco, an amazing and fascinating first week. I’ve been having an immersion of sorts in what the company stands for and what it does, and I thought I should share some of those first experiences here, as it’s been an extremely intense and deep learning experience.

As context,  Selco has three different entities;

       1)Selco India which is a ‘for profit with social objective’ company with business being in the area of providing decentralized clean energy efficiencies, mostly solar power, with specific focus on the underserved sections of society, in rural and urban India. 

    2)Selco Foundation, which is the research wing with need based research and  innovation  in clean energy usability in underserved communities with focus categorized as a) rural  b) urban c) tribal  d) livelihood  e) education and f) vulnerability

    3) Selco Incubation, an NGO with specific objective to identify and  incubate other individuals and social enterprises to replicate the Selco story, across India and other developing countries

Through this week I visited two of the Selco branches at Manipal and Udipi, where I got to closely observe how the process of sales and revenue balance with the philosophy and culture of the company. I also visited a few solar lighting installations at Udipi, water heating installations at Manipal and a solar based sewing machine installation at Mandya.

My first visit was to a slum in Udipi, a slum which has around eighty families living in basic shacks, of the blue plastic sheet kind, and with no electricity connection whatsoever. There one shack had a part which was converted into an energy center of sorts, with a solar installation which enables the charging of thirty small batteries, which in turn charge as many solar lanterns. Shankar the resident runs the energy center by ensuring all the batteries are charged through the day and he in turn provides solar lanterns  to the other shacks on a daily rental basis. With this, other shacks rent light for four hours a day, and what’s more, we have one person who has been converted into entrepreneur. It was truly touching.

I also visited the house of a farmer whose livelihood comes from running a small dairy of about 8 cows but whose location does not enable him to access grid electricity. The farmer was living in the dark until Selco happened, and he now has 2 lights and a fan being installed, and is looking forward to his children studying better as they can now continue studying even after the sun sets.

Mandya was an even bigger surprise. Just 8 kms off the Mysore highway is this small village of 300 houses where we visited a woman entrepreneur who is running a sewing unit with fifteen machines, supplying stitched shirts to a retailer in Bangalore. She was struggling with just four hours of daily electricity. Selco foundation has innovated and supplied a DC unit for a sewing machine, which is under pilot for a week now. She said that it was enabling her to run the machine for a continuous period of 8 hours and she can now hope to expand her business considerably. This will have huge impact on her livelihood, and will be very encouraging for any other business in the village and also surrounding villages.

I was almost moved to tears in each of these places; essentially to see how life changing the impact of decentralized energy could be on the living standards and livelihood conditions of the households it impacted. And in a country where the official statistic is that of 40% of the population not even being connected to the grid, there is little left to be said regarding the need and the work to be done.