Searching for Social Change

Ahmed: For a long time, Auroville Consulting has been aware of power problems in the villages that hamper their development. Although official figures show that 100% of the villages in Tamil Nadu are electrified, this is misleading as a village will be shown as ‘fully electrified’ if only 10% of the homes are connected to the electrical grid. Moreover, even homes that are connected suffer frequent power cuts.

These have many social and economic impacts. They affect the education of children as well as agriculture, and the viability of small-scale industries. This is why many people migrate from the villages to urban centres.

A basic way to resolve this is to provide a reliable electricity supply. But if we provide this with conventional fossil fuels we will be using the very polluting Indian coal. So the obvious answer is sustainable energy.

Our goal is to ‘solarise’ 100 villages in Tamil Nadu by 2030, which means installing around 100 MW of new solar capacity in rural Tamil Nadu. This will provide energy security to more than 200,000 people, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 129,000 tonnes.

An additional idea is to democratize benefits arising from renewable energy generation by contributing 10% of the net cash profit from the sale of solar energy to village level self-help groups.

The installation target for the first year is 3 MW. Targets for the following years will continuously increase to reach a total installed capacity of 100 MW in 10 years.

Irumbai, a nearby village, was the site of the first pilot project in association with TEDA (Tamil Nadu Energy Department Agency). Local women and youth helped us do an energy audit and energy-efficient fans and lights have already been installed. But further work has been stalled over the allocation of land for the solar panels.

Solarising even one village requires financial means. So we started looking at different sources of funding for the project. Our co-founder, Martin, learned about Ecosia, an internet search engine in Germany which uses revenue generated from searches to plant trees in Africa. Ecosia has now been operating successfully for ten years. So we wondered if we could do the same thing in India to help solarise villages here.

The leading commercial search engines are making a lot of money. But surely it requires huge resources and expertise to develop a search engine?

We haven’t designed our search engine from scratch. Like Ecosia, we are collaborating with a technology service provider. This service provider provides the search results and we have entered into a revenue sharing model with them.

How does it work?

If you click on an advertisement on our site we earn money. But users also have the option to use an ad-blocker. In fact, we are happy if users simply use us to search.

One of the issues with Google and other big search sites is they collect information on users and then sell this to advertisers who then target advertisements. What is your policy?

The service provider for the Solar Village Search Engine does collect information on users but allows us to choose which information we are going to collect. On our site, no personal data will be collected and no information about our users will be shared. But the number of searches will be recorded as, by the end of the first three months, we hope to reach 100,000 searches per day (meaning about 40,000 users). Otherwise, our partner will not be interested in continuing with the collaboration.

That’s a big target. How will you achieve it?

We are looking for support from organisations and people we have previously partnered with or who are associated with Auroville, like Auroville International. Greenpeace India, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund, and the Alliance for Rural Electrification are already supporting us. We are also working on collaborating with e-commerce platforms, such as organic online shops, in order to reach a wider audience. We are also connecting to social media because our target group is youth. By 2020, 600 million will be using the Internet in India, and the majority will be the youth. We will have Solar Village ambassadors, young people who want to promote the search engine in their organisation or on their campus, and we will give them a certificate and proper recognition.

In addition, a few universities and their students are collaborating with us on dissemination and coming up with marketing strategies.

But are young people really interested in supporting a project like this?

The feedback we have received is that youth are definitely connected to these causes, but they don’t have time to practically contribute. However, we are not asking them for money, just to use our search engine. By using this search engine, if you worry about children you are helping children, if you’re worried about rural agriculture you are helping agriculture, if you’re worried about the loss of rural small-scale units, you are helping support small-scale units. So we are providing people with an easy way to help to make big changes in the villages.

And we want to be transparent. We will publish all our financial reports.

Are you hoping to attract advertisers who also support social improvement? Otherwise, you may also be indirectly supporting businesses that contradict your vision.

We are aware of the possible ethical contradictions but right now the advertising is not under our control. In future, we may be able to develop guidelines, but we are quite far from that at present. For the moment, our focus is on providing a very good search engine because we are competing with the commercial ones that dominate the market, and if people are not satisfied with our search engine many will switch back to the one they use today. We want to connect to people who really want to help this cause while giving them an excellent search engine.

Let’s look at figures. What is the cost of solarising a village?

A village of 500 people will require 250 kW of solar capacity. This will cost about 1.15 crore rupees.

And how much do you expect to earn from the search engine?

Our current projection is that, if we get the right number of searches, we can get two crore rupees a year from our search engine to begin with. This will gradually increase, so after five years we may be earning up to eight crore rupees a year.

But if you are aiming to solarise 100 villages by 2030, the search engine will only provide a small part of the money. Where will the rest of the money come from?

The current thinking is to have a solar village fund. This fund will have three distinct income streams: the solar village search engine, revenue from the sale of solar energy and grants and donations. We are expecting that this Solar Village Search Engine initiative will give us

visibility to attract funds from Corporate Social Responsibility schemes etc.

How will you choose which villages you are going to work with?

Auroville Village Action currently works in 98 villages in Villupuram District. The first solar villages may be selected from these villages. We will start with the villages close to Auroville. After doing energy audits, we will select based on population size, annual electricity consumption and the availability of land.

We will also need strong village level support from the panchayats and self-help groups. The initial phase may be difficult, but once we gain their trust it should be much easier as everybody is looking to better their lives. If we successfully solarise a few villages, interest will increase because others will know that we are doing our job and this will make our reception in villages far from Auroville much easier.

The business plan is that some of the surplus electricity will be sold to private companies – this income will help solarise other villages – but 10% of this money will go back to the village where the panels are located. Then the villagers will have to sit together to decide how to use the money for the development of the village. This is called participatory budgeting.

Won’t this be challenging in villages made up of different communities, castes?

Our experience in Irumbai, where there are different communities, has been very positive. There the head of the village is a woman. Women are the most forward-looking people in our society at present and are very supportive of this project because they want to see their children’s lives change.