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IIT Madras tech lighting up the dark alleys of Indian villages

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CIOL IIT, Madras tech lighting up the dark alleys of Indian villages

A tiny hamlet of 58 households, part of a small town called phalodi in Rajasthan, has been lighting up their houses only with kerosene lamps, until now. Thanks to a technology developed by IIT Madras, their houses have electricity for the first time ever.

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The town recently hit headlines as it sizzled at 51 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever recorded in India. Shaitanram, a farmer from Likhmasar village on the edge of the Thar Desert, is one of the early beneficiaries of the technology. He is ecstatic that his five-member household "has literally seen a new dawn".

The developers of the new disruptive technology claim that it has the potential to light up households of over 300 million Indians who have no access to assured electric supply even today.

Since a past few months, a bunch of energetic engineers from IIT, Madras have been toiling in the heat and dust typical of Rajasthan, to bring electricity to the town and surrounding hamlets DC or Direct Current. Currently, only Alternating Current is used as an electrification standard in India. Professor Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director of IIT, Madras calls it potentially a game changer technology.

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"It is not a new invention but the world had abandoned using DC power to electrify homes," he says. The IIT engineers are striving to revive usage of DC as a potential solution to India's electricity woes. The technology can also be helpful in achieving Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promise of providing electricity to every household by 2022. The technology, which can also help cut down greenhouse emissions, has received a backing from Energy Minister Piyush Goyal and is now being pushed for field tests as a last-mile solution.

Under the program started by IIT, Madras engineers, houses are provided with a simple one square meter solar panel. The electricity generated by the panel is stored in four regular lead acid batteries and the electrical appliances instead of running on AC power run on DC power. In Phalodi, this off-grid power solution is totally run on DC power. This makes the whole system between 25-30 percent more efficient and brings down power consumption by almost 50 per cent. It costs about Rs 25,000 to install the entire 'inverter- less system', says an ex-IIT Madras engineer and project manager for the Phalodi project Surbhi Maheshwari. Each beneficiary house is also given a ceiling fan, one LED tube light an LED bulb and cell phone charging point, all of which runs on DC power.

Till now, 1800 homes have been connected and another 2200 will be brought under the program in the next few months.

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