Reaching Out To The Sun

A village in Rajasthan trains poor African women to harness solar energy.

- Sneha Bhura

It is 4 pm at the Barefoot College in Tilonia, a village in the Ajmer district of Rajasthan. A pristine white courtyard leads to a room where the large centre table is littered with an assortment of electrical bits and bobs—multimeter, nose plier, wire cutter, soldering iron, resistors, diodes, charge controller and the works. An aerial view of the table might resemble a high-tech multi-coloured world map. The middle-aged women seated around the table have come from Cambodia, Suriname, Guatemala, Namibia, Burkina Faso, Malawi, magically amplifying the imagery of a world enclosed within the four corners of a page to that of a classroom. On the blackboard facing the table, there are names of colours written in Swahili: chokuda, bulauni, chofira, orenji, yero... (black, brown, red, orange, yellow), explaining the standard colour coding in this ‘Solar Workshop’.