Energy : The Prime MoverEnergy : The Prime Movers
Ashok Khosla

Rural communities have many needs that are yet to be satisfied. In fact, for a significant majority of our people, most of the basic needs are largely unmet: food, water, shelter, cooking fuel, health care and education — not to mention social justice and a life of dignity.

It has been our steady contention that the surest and most sustainable way to satisfy these needs is the creation of sustainable livelihoods, which are basically jobs that produce goods and services needed by people and that create the purchasing power they need to acquire these goods and services. Sustainable livelihoods also help to regenerate the environmental resource base on which people in the countryside depend for most of their needs.

A fundamental prerequisite for the creation of sustainable livelihoods as well as to satisfy other immediate basic needs is energy. Energy in the form of heat is needed to cook food, boil water, and stay warm during the winter. Mechanical energy is needed to drive machines and vehicles. And electricity is needed for lighting, communications and industry. Electrical and mechanical energy is the basis of efficient agriculture, irrigation, transportation, industry and commerce. Without it, households would have to do without water, light or thermal comfort — as, in fact, many millions in our country do today.

The major sources of energy include fossil fuels, on which most of the modern sectors of industry, transportation and power depend. Fossil fuels in our country come from (very poor quality) domestic coal or from oil and gas, a large part of which is imported. In either case, they cause immense problems of pollution on local scale and carbon emissions, which cause undesirable global impacts. India has huge reserves of renewable resources (biomass, solar, wind and hydro), which are environmentally much more benign, but these are largely untapped.

Some 40% of India’s energy use is from "non-commercial" fuels — wood, cow dung and other biomass — used primarily for household cooking. Use of these in poorly designed appliances entail huge environmental and health problems of their own. Modern fuels and the means to convert them to usable energy are beyond the reach of a very large part of India’s population.

If there is one technological innovation that could truly create a revolution in the lives of the rural poor, it is a device that could create mechanical or electrical energy from renewable fuels on a scale usable by small industries, farmers and households. To be more precise, the specifications for such a machine would read:

There is no way such a device would be designed or developed in the North: fossil fuels are heavily subsidized (by treasuries and by nature) and are available cheaply and everywhere. Reliable and plentiful electricity is widely available, except occasionally in California. And most applications, particularly in California, require much larger amounts of power. In fact, such prime movers were widely available a hundred years back, in the form of small, stationary steam engines, and used all over North America and Europe. They were swept away by the flood of petroleum products that inundated the global economy at the beginning of the 20th century. What technology could compete with a fuel that cost One Dollar a barrel and worked with the push button convenience of an internal combustion engine?

And by 1950, electricity was available, cheaply and everywhere. Not so in India. Today, or for the next fifty years. Based on their performance over the past fifty years, neither the government nor the corporate sector are likely to address this problem.

While DESI Power has undertaken to set up small power stations based on renewable fuels, such as biomass through gasification, it will be many decades before electricity will be universally available. But it is needed now, and it has to be made available on an enterprise or household basis, using energy sources that are widely accessible: biomass and the Sun.

A multi-purpose engine, using a variety of renewable fuels and driving a small electrical generator, would be the ultimate Gandhian technology that can bring genuine Swaraj ("Self Rule") to the Indian village. It can only be created in India. And, only by Gandhian institutions.

For this effort, it is worth investing all the R&D resources we can muster. q