It is not easy to be an Indian villager. Almost certainly you live in a village without a grid connection or if you are lucky, a connection that provides power sporadically for less than 12hours a day. In a cruel irony you might even have been displaced by a new hydro power project or living close enough to a power plant to be able to see the bright lights, but not have a light in your home. And you certainly don't worry about sustainability or climate change, not on a hungry stomach. These were the thoughts looping in my mind as I walked around the village of Dyssekilde and after listening to great talk about Samsø. I enjoyed that trip to the Danish countryside to meet some fascinating people who had willingly chosen to migrate to rural settings and the tale of a community deciding to generate its own electricity from wind was inspiring to say the least. But did I have anything to learn from them? Could I really try and apply any of their ideas to Indian villages? I'm still not sure. What I do know is that similar self-reliant villages that produce their own electricity and recycle their wastes do exist in India!

The contrast between Dissekilde or Samsø and these villages is that they produce their own electricity and recycle waste out of sheer necessity. Because they cannot continue to wait for the government to do something about their issues. And in doing so, they are incidentally mitigating GHG emissions and are (partly) following sustainable models. There's a Hindi word called jugaad. Jugaad literally means an arrangement or a work around, which have to be used because of lack of resources. The jugaad principles drives development and innovation in the forgotten corners of India. In these forgotten corners people survive despite the government, driven by the human need to live a better life. Off the top of my head I can recollect a few well documented ones. I've written about one in this post, and will write about few more in another post.

The idea of a community working together to be sustainable and self-reliant is a very poweful one that was stressed upon strongly by Mahatma Gandhi(not Ghandi) as a tool to fight the British government and to empower the impoverished and decrease economic divide. Somewhere in the past 70 years urban Indians forgot these ideas, but thankfully a hundred villages in an area called Tilonia have used these principles to create an extraordinary self-sustained community called the Barefoot College.

Tilonia is better known as the 'Barefoot College'(because people who come to train literally couldn't afford shoes), which has been drawing all its electricity from the sun since 1986. The college was designed to be a self-sustained community that generated its own power, supplied its own water, recycled its waste and also train people from different parts of the country to replicate the same model in their villages. This college covers around 82,349 sq km with 110 villages and 100,000 inhabitants.

This college was founded in 1971 by Bunker Roy to empower the poor to solve their own problems of unemployment, lack of access to basic infrastructure, be completely self-reliant and also solve social problems of gender disparity and caste divide. The idea was the poor have capacity and resources to solve their own problems and follow sustainable models very unlike from urban models. The entire campus has been built by a peasant who can't read or write, but using intuition and age old local knowledge of materials and design, the campus consists of dome buildings to conserver space, not unlike geodesic domes, and everything built by the local inhabitants. The electricity supply is overlooked by a barely literate temple priest. And even though the village is in the dry state of Rajasthan and borders the Thar desert, they've ensured a regular supply of water by harvesting rain water in different parts of the campus and linking them to 183 underground tanks. The water has decreased desertification and soil salinity. And they've reclaimed waste land for growing fodder and firewood. Over 3,000 children are made environmentally aware through an unique curriculum and the college employs about 7,000 people as technicians, teachers, health workers and artisans.

Today they train rural people coming from different parts of India and the world. This project’s water, solar, lighting and night school programmes are being replicated at the National level. The impact on local population has been obviously extraordinary. I see Tilonia as an ideal example of what a self sustained village in India could look like. Driven by different and more basic motives of the local people, such villages are extraordinary tales to learn from. Even though I live about a hundred kilometres from this village, I've never had a chance to visit it and only have heard about it from more fortunate friends of mine. This project even though is quite well documented considering Indian standards, its still not enough.

Now can you see some parallels with Dyssekilde or Samsø? I sure was wrong when I remarked to somebody that Samsø just couldn't exist in India, when it did, just that I didn't see the parallels right away.

Here are more links to read about Tilonia. 

http://ignca.nic.in/cd_05021.htm

http://www.unep.org/desertification/successstories/19.htm

(For people who haven't heard about Samsø or Dyssekilde: Samsø is a small island that in 1997 won the Danish government contest to become a model renewable energy community. Today all its power comes from the wind. Dyssekilde is a small village of 120 people near Copenhagen that generates most of its own electricity and manages its own waste. See pics here http://climatechange.thinkaboutit.eu/think2/post/dyssekilde_-_little_architecture_many_sustainable_homes/)

image credit- Treehugger