Creating Environment Friendly Projects in Rural India – A Synergy Framework for Sustainable Renewable Energy

The Electricity supply in rural areas of India is abysmal. Though the government has succeeded in providing electricity to large groups of Indian villages through Grid based electricity, the supply has its limitations. Indian villages suffer with rampant power cuts and illegal power usages. Advocates of sustainability recommend of environmentally friendly renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, biomass and micro-hydro projects. However, several Renewable Energy (RE) projects have demonstrated limited success due to various reasons such as lack of technical skills, lack of funding for maintenance of RE projects, lack of administrative skills. A qualitative synergy framework was developed using an interdisciplinary approach of blending finance, social sciences, human resources management and technology. This approach envisages eliminating some inherent weaknesses of the existing network of schemes and enhancing strengths by right combinations of these schemes. This framework was created by applying extensive literature search from various governmental and non-governmental sources, focus group discussions with self help groups, non-governmental organizations (NGO), observed NGO activities, rural microfinance schemes in Maharashtra, India. In this paper, we propose a framework that captures the synergies of microfinance models, rural women empowerment, their capacity building programs, and renewable energy methods. We find that involvement of women is the key to the turnaround and sustain environment friendly projects in rural India. There are six synergistic relationships which can positively contribute towards long term sustainability of rural RE projects. These six synergistic relationships, namely MF--CB, MF--WE, MF--RE, WE--CB, WE--RE and CB--RE need to be examined further for their impact on the success of RE projects