Three years after lighting up the electricity-deprived remote villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with power harnessed through rice husk, the team behind the venture is now undertaking a similar task in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

Beginning with Tamkuha in Bihar, the ‘Husk Power System' designed by NRI entrepreneur Gyanesh Pandey has gone on to dispel darkness in over 125 villages since 2007.

“The conventional technologies and grids had failed to deliver for the pervasive energy starvation in the country and I wanted to find an environmental-friendly non-conventional source and low cost of energy,” Mr. Pandey told PTI.

A native of Bihar's Baithania village, he chucked a promising career in the semiconductor industry in the U.S.. The engineering and management graduate, along with friends Ratnesh Yadav, Manoj Sinha and Charles W. Ransler, started the company to bring power to the rural population. Assisted by S.K. Singh, a scientist in the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Mr. Pandey's team rejigged the decades-old technology of biomass gasification deployed by rice millers in Bihar to power their mills using rice husk.

“The process is called gasification, where the husk is burnt in controlled conditions to produce a combustible mixture of gases [smoke]. This gas is filtered and fed into an engine that drives an alternator to produce power,” he said.

The idea was to provide electricity at a rate lower than the cost of the current alternative, significantly keeping a unit profitable enough to ensure its long term functioning. “The baseline price is Rs. 80 per month for two CFLs + mobile charging [approx 50W] per month. Users get discount as they purchase more than 100 W. The idea is to slash the cost of the alternative by at least half.” said Mr. Yadav.

The Hindu, 26 July, 2010, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article533665.ece