Kundapura, a town in coastal Karnataka has been transformed by some of the 95,000 solar lighting installations by Selco Solar, a Bangalore-based social enterprise that is determined to illuminate the poorest of the poor areas in the country.

Harish Hande, 39, who co-founded Selco with Neville Williams in 1995, started it in the face of a cold shoulder from 'experts' who told him of the futility of the effort; that the cost of his products was prohibitive and villagers just wouldn't take to them.

The seeds of Selco were planted on a trip to the Dominican Republic while Hande was pursuing his studies in energy engineering at the Center for Sustainable Energy at the University of Massachusetts. He saw the poor there using solar lighting.

Soon, Hande was in touch with Neville Williams, who had founded an NGO, Solar Electric Light Fund, or SELF, to promote solar energy in developing countries. In 1993 SELF received $40,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to install solar lights in 100 rural Indian houses. It asked Hande, still studying, to run the project.

For over two-and-a-half years, Hande travelled the length and breadth of Karnataka, explaining how solar lighting worked and installing it in homes of wealthy farmers who could afford the Rs 10,000 system. He convinced rural banks to lend to poor families who wanted to buy the lights. All this while he was on, as he puts it, "a subsidised living"; he lived with friends and relatives while travelling.

After Hande had installed some 400 solar light systems, Selco received $128,000 from USAID, through its partner Winrock, to finance the first three rural service centres that sold, installed and serviced solar lights. With this, he took his first step towards building a sustainable rural delivery system. "This can succeed if you provide service and financing at the doorstep," he says.

Over two years, 1999 and 2001, Selco saw equity infusion of $750,000 after Williams raised funds in the US to promote solar lighting in India and Vietnam. The ownership of Selco was transferred from SELF to a US for-profit firm. With the new investors, Hande got a 2.5 per cent stake. Meanwhile, Selco received a $1 million loan from the International Finance Corporation, the soft lending arm of the World Bank, in 2003.

Selco broke even in March 2001 and earned cash surpluses for several years.

Hande now aims to sell solar lights to 200,000 more rural families in four years. The company provides regular after-sales service and aims to respond to breakdowns within 24 hours.

It supplies technology and know-how to many NGOs and is assisting Small Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund, or S3IDF, in development of collaborations with local financial institutions.

Since that first sale in Puttur in Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka in September 1994, Selco, which was not even registered when the first sale was clinched, has come a long way. "We started with Rs 1,000 because that is all the money we had," says Hande.

But his model of social enterprise is equally important. He wants to prove that one can make profits while trying to meet social objectives. So there is still some way to go.

Source: Rediff

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