Lighting up their lives

Shell is helping street vendors in Bangalore give up traditional kerosene-based lamps in favour of clean lighting solutions based on CFL and dry battery.

The knowledge of how a rechargeable battery charges and discharges is crucial to the success of small entrepreneur Ramesh B and his wife Manjula. They rent out battery-powered lights to street vendors in Naganathpura and Garepalya near Bommanahalli in southern Bangalore.

They charge the vendors Rs 15 per day. Ramesh, who earlier drove an autorickshaw and delivered to households for a living, now uses the autorickshaw for delivering the 7-watt CFL lamps powered by 12v batteries.

He starts delivering the first set of batteries from 4 pm and picks up the bulb and battery from each vendor later at night. The vendors earlier used the Petromax lantern till the CFL lamps came along.

The street vendors used to spend anywhere between Rs 25 and Rs 45 earlier on the kerosene for petromax lanterns. And, the lanterns were polluting and the eatables sold by the vendors also used to have a tinge of kerosene fumes and the quality of the food was affected.

"I have to service 60 customers," said Ramesh as he prepared to load the batteries and the lamps into his vehicle.

With this being the festive season, demand is higher. He has had to spend around Rs 1.5 lakh on the business, the loan for which was secured from a bank with the help of Small Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund (S³IDF), a non-profit company.

He has been a beneficiary of the Shell Foundation-backed scheme to bring environmentally-friendly lighting to homes and businesses of the poor. S³IDF has been recognised by the World Clean Energy Awards held in Basel, Switzerland, as an award-winning NGO initiative.

The Shell Foundation partner, S³IDF partners Shell Foundation's Excelerate programme. "Ramesh was introduced by Vijay Kumar who was initially identified by S³IDF for implementing the project in Bangalore," said Krishna Chaitanya Rao P, S³IDF's chief operating officer.

Vijay Kumar, an erstwhile autorickshaw driver, uses six solar panels to charge his 100-odd batteries. He has been doing this for about two years and he has bought a second-hand car now to deliver the batteries to his customers. "We helped him secure the loan for the car and his entire investment," said Rao.

Each battery attaches to a lamp that lights a stall during the evening peak buying hours. At the end of the night Vijay and his assistant or his son collects the batteries and takes them home and connects them to the solar panels.

Vijay, who with the help of S³IDF borrowed money from a local bank to buy the lamps and the solar recharging system, makes around 4,000 rupees a month during the three-to-five year loan repayment period and will make up about 8,000 a month after that.

Vijay is one of 25 entrepreneurs S³IDF has helped establish businesses supplying lighting to stallholders.

Many more lighting projects are planned in south India in the next two to three years. These investments are expected to directly benefit some 3,000 families. In addition they are structured to provide sufficient transactional experience to allow the detailed design of a larger project benefiting up to 10,000 households.

S³IDF acts as a social merchant bank by running a fund, including $800,000 (around Rs 3.2 crore) from Shell Foundation, which invests in really small scale entrepreneurs. S³IDF has implemented some 45 lighting projects for both the urban and rural poor in south India, which has benefited nearly 14,000 people till date.

Shell Foundation's partnership with S³IDF was established in 2001, with S³IDF's headquarters in Bangalore being established in 2004. Based on the success achieved in the first five years of the partnership with S³IDF, Shell Foundation agreed in 2007 to commit more funds.