Low-Cost Lamps In Rural India

According to a Yahoo! News report by Anuj Chopra, some 100,000 Indian villages do not yet have electricity. But with the installation of innovative, low-cost, solar-powered LED lights, the rural poor villages are leap-frogging into the 21st Century.

The innovative lights were installed by the Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation (GSBF), a Bombay-based nongovernmental organization focused on bringing light to rural India. The GSBF lamps use LEDs - light emitting diodes - that are four times more efficient than an incandescent bulb. After a $55 installation cost, solar energy lights the lamp free of charge.

As many as 1.5 billion people - nearly 80 million in India alone - light their houses using kerosene as the primary lighting media. The fuel is dangerous, dirty, and - despite being subsidized - consumes nearly 4 percent of a typical rural Indian household's budget. A recent report by the Intermediate Technology Development Group suggests that indoor air pollution from such lighting media results in 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year.

LED lamps, or more specifically white LEDS, are believed to produce nearly 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp and almost 50 times the amount of useful light of a conventional bulb. They require far less maintenance, a longer life, and as villagers jokingly say, "no electricity bills."