Solar lights most sought-after poll-time freebies

Renewable energy may have missed the agenda of political parties but solar lights have caught the imagination of candidates as well as election officers.

Updated on: Apr 21, 2014, 03:09:42 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Renewable energy may have missed the agenda of political parties but solar lights have caught the imagination of candidates as well as election officers.

A-solar-panel-in-Uttar-Pradesh-s-Bhandani-Deepak-Gupta-HT-Photo

Some candidates in the rural hinterlands in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are trying to woo voters with solar lights, which are in great demand, while the EC deployed them to conduct polls in Maoist-hit and remote areas, where regular power supply is still a distant dream.

The business of solar lighting systems is on the rise, especially in areas which don’t have a regular power supply in remote rural areas. This election the lights have also come in handy for candidates, thanks to cost-effective ones made in China.

According to government data, about 40% of Indian villages don’t get regular power supply. However, some of them have been provided with solar electricity systems that can run a fan, a couple of lights and a TV set.

“The business of solar lighting systems in rural Bihar and UP is worth Rs 10,000 crore,” a senior official of the ministry of new and renewable energy had told HT in February. Its resonance is being felt in the 2014 summer elections, when power generation fails to meet the demand.

Election Commission sleuths in late March caught a van in Farukkabad in Uttar Pradesh carrying solar lights allegedly for distribution among voters. The local police registered a case against the candidate for violation of the model code of conduct.

In another incident, the EC’s flying squad caught a tempo carrying China-made solar lights in Patna. The lights were said to be given to nominees of some unnamed candidates for use in the elections. EC officials in Delhi said there have been a few other cases of solar lights seized in UP and Bihar but the numbers were not very large.

More than the numbers, the sporadic cases highlight the increasing demand from people in backward regions for regular power supply. “We have seen a spurt in the demand for solar lights during this election,” a senior executive of a company that manufactures and markets solar lights across India said on condition of anonymity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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