India's Sundarbans mangroves now a beacon of solar power

“It was like a curfew at dark earlier,” says Tapan Mandal of Rabat Jubilee village. “But today the village has a new life after sunset. Households are abuzz with activities and shops stay open till late.”

Thirteen million people live on the forest fringes among the mazes of salty waterways. Home to the Bengal tiger and several national parks, the magnificent ecosystem is a Unesco world heritage site. But grid power cannot be transmitted to the remote and scattered islands, leaving the local population dependent on other sources including kerosene, but also solar power.

The necessity has turned the region into a showcase for India’s renewable energy drive, with more than 1 million people in the mangrove delta now using solar electricity.

The first solar lighting system was installed in 1993 for 100 families by local authorities. Now solar power covers around 40 per cent of the population, says SP Gon Chaudhuri, the former director of the state renewable energy agency, which was responsible for launching the project.

In Rabat Jubilee, Mandal is the secretary of the cooperative council that runs the village’s solar network, set up by World Wildlife Fund(WWF) in 2011.

The network connects 63 out of the around 100 households, and provides enough power for each house to have a light and a fan for eight hours after dark.

The extra power also helps businesses. Harshit Sarkar, 30, says he can earn an extra 1,000 rupees (Bt540) a day at his shop repairing mobile phones, televisions and other electronics.

It also keeps tigers away from the settlement, reducing conflict with humans, which is why the WWF supports the project in Rabat Jubilee and three nearby villages. The number of tiger attacks in the lit villages fell to one last year, compared to the dozens killed or maimed in previous years, WWF officer Debmalya Roy Chowdhury says.

In addition to the publicly funded projects, more than 100,000individuals have brought private solar panels for 10,000 rupees, which have become a common sight on the huts’ thatched roofs, and solar-lighting systems have become a common wedding gift.

India recently declared its objective to ramp up grid-connected solar power projects from 20 gigawatts (GW) today to 100GW by 2022.

“Solar power has brought us out of the dark ages,” villager Shyampad Mandal says. “Everyone has mobiles and households have TV sets, we get connected to the world outside. And our children can study late into the evenings.”

The region’s adoption by necessity of low-carbon technology has made it one of the lowest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gases in the world. Paradoxically, its location also means it will be one of the first to feel the impact of global warming, as an increase in sea-borne storms or rise in water levels will hit low-lying coastal areas first.

“People from the cities pollute the planet while Sundarbans uses clean energy and does not have a single industrial plant,” Gon Chaudhuri says. 

“People here seem to ask the city-dwellers, ‘Why are you destroying us, what is our fault?’”