Four engineering graduates introduce electricity to villages in north K’taka

There are several rural hamlets in India that are still alien to the idea of electricity and its daily applications. And this fact was an eye-opener to a small group of engineering graduates.

Since the government won’t act, these students were determined to. Thanks to ‘Project Belaku’ a few villages in rural north Karnataka now have electricity.

Ghatakunang and Khangaon are two such rural regions in Uttara (north) Karnataka. And till the recent past, both the villages lived in darkness. The villagers’ daily affairs were based on the sun’s movement from east to west. 

130 years have passed since electricity was first introduced in India, and as per unofficial statistics, nearly 18,000 villages still haven’t got electricity. 

Sunny Arokia Swamy and his friends Balachandra Hegde, Kumaraswamy and Kotresh Veerapur who recently graduated with a degree in electrical and electronics engineering from one of the prominent technology schools in the state, decided to do something about this dismal state of affairs.

“When we first heard about this, we were absolutely shocked, we decided that we should do something about this,” Betterindia.com quoted Sunny.

“This happened in the last week of January. By the first week of February, we contacted a local NGO and, with the help of one of their people, we made our way to the Kali Tiger Reserve area, in the Uttara Kannada district,” Sunny added.

The group then surveyed eight villages in the area.

“We realised that during the monsoons, villagers in the area face a lot of problems since they are in the backwaters of the SUPA dam. This means that their houses are often flooded. The villages get completely isolated,” Sunny explained to betterindia.com.

It wasn’t just electricity the villages were deprived of. There were several issues regarding health, education and connectivity.

“We felt that the best that we could do for them would be in our area of expertise: energy,” he said.

After conducting a technical survey, the group narrowed down on using solar energy to brighten the lives of these villagers. The college management offered to fund the project so as to implement the idea in five households in the village. By the end of it, the project had, in fact, helped 18 households.

The four professionals had aimed to create stand alone solar systems and thus Project Belaku was born.

The team was determined to complete the project within two months.

“But since all four of us work full-time jobs, we could only work over the weekend,” Sunny said. “So we decided to involve the third year students from our college.”

The four friends and 13 junior students joined hands together to bring about the change in the villages.

“We were a little worried about how it would work and whether anything would go wrong because we had only tested it in Bangalore. Also, none of us are professionals and it was the first time we were all doing something like this,” Sunny explained.

They had to slog under the scorching heat and at night they had to work using a torchlight. But all the hard work paid off! 

The team succeeded in installing 18 systems, introducing electricity to 18 households in two villages!

“We are now working on Project Belaku Phase II, where we will look at solar pumps, solar water purifiers and hydro projects. We have also identified the two villages we want to work with next,” Sunny summed up.

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