Solar Man – Chetan Singh Solanki

Chat with Chetan Singh Solanki, Prof of Energy Sciences at IIT Bombay

Chetan Singh Solanki grew up in a small village in MP. His dad was a farmer and Chetan’s education till grade 4 was in a single room village school. He shifted from there to Indore for his secondary school education. After finishing his engineering, he went on to do his M.Tech from IIT Bombay. He worked for some time before going to Belgium to do his PhD in Solar Energy. Returned back to India after his PhD and joined as faculty at IIT Bombay. I would have thought Grameen Bank’s Mohammed Yunus is his role model; Chetan tells me that it is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. As a professor of Energy science, Chetan was clear: our addiction to energy is going to be the cause for planetary destruction. And like a superhero, he decided that he needed to do something more than teaching brilliant kids at IIT to save the planet.

The government has made Right to Education part of the constitution. He also set up a 14 acre school near his village which does not draw a single unit of electricity from the grid. About 1000 students study today in this school. A lot of village kids still had no electricity to study. For 3 years, Chetan worked to get this right to light to kids. He has got solar lanterns to more than 1 crore kids in India. And in the process he has also created an eco-system of manufacturing these at the village level. Inspired by Gandhi, he has coined an interesting term: Energy swaraj. (https://energyswaraj.org/ ) The idea is to democratize energy production at both village and towns level. He took a sabbatical from IIT for a year to spread this idea across the globe, visiting 30 countries to spread the message.

And in a Ram-like fashion, in 2019 he vowed to spend 11 years on the road, away from home, to deliver the single message of energy frugality. Took yet another sabbatical, got himself a Tata bus, converted it to a frugal home, fitted 3 kW of solar panels on it and hit the road. He has educated half a million people in this one year on energy literacy. Like a modern day Gandhi, he extracts promises from the energy rich to share their energy with the poor. The bus has traveled extensively in UP, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. I met with him at the BAIF campus in Warje, where he is parked till 20-Jan before he heads to Aurangabad.

I purchased some lovely solar powered diyas from Chetan. They switch on automatically when the sun sets. Am planning to use a diya on my cycle as a tail lamp. We don’t do too much energy math in our lives. Everything we use has energy that has gone into making it. Even the solar panels that Chetan advocates, take 1.5 years to achieve energy breakeven. Accounting for all that indirect energy usage is an arduous task. Chetan has a simple suggestion – start with something more tangible: your monthly electricity bill. Can you get that down to near zero? Must confess that my own home monthly electricity bill of Rs. 1800 is nothing to be too proud of. My personal target would be to get it down to Rs. 1500. Let the yatra to energy swaraj begin!