Two summers have gone by since Taslima* and her classmates last saw the fans in their classroom stir the air. Their home state of Assam is getting hotter, but for the students of the Indadiya Islamia Madrassa on Chalakura Char, a river island 280 km away from Assam’s capital city Guwahati, there has been no respite from the heat. Nor have they had electric light to aid their studies.
This is despite the fact that solar panels were installed at the madrassa (an Islamic religious education institute) in 2018 under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana rural electrification scheme. The Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana continues and extends nationally conceived schemes already active for more than a decade to help achieve 100% electrification. A key challenge was rural electrification in off-grid areas, which became easier once affordable solar home kits became available. This was especially important for a state like Assam, a third of whose area is flood prone, and is considered the most vulnerable to climate impacts of the 12 states in the Indian Himalayan region.
Between 2016 and 2021, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana subsidised the provision of a solar power kit consisting of a panel controller and a battery running on lead acid or gel; under the current phase of the scheme running from 2022 to 2027, beneficiaries receive lithium-ion batteries.
In 2021, the solar panels at the Indadiya Islamia Madrassa stopped working, after only three years. The vice president of the Madrassa, Mahibul Islam Ahmed, notified the local panchayat (elected village council), who raised the issue with the contractor, but nobody came to check on the equipment. Under the terms of the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana scheme’s tender, the vendor should be responsible for a comprehensive maintenance contract lasting five years. While complaints have been forwarded to the contractors, vendors and the state government-run Assam Power Distribution Company Limited, which assessed and awarded bids to vendors, the villagers have received no response.
“The students face a lot of problems when it comes to electricity. Most of the char dwellers are below the poverty level, so they can’t afford to send their children to mainland schools. When the solar panels were installed, the students benefited from them, [but] the school has been running without electricity for three years now. No one came to do an inspection or survey. We are still waiting for something to happen,” said Ahmed.
In the meanwhile, more than 300 students at the school – both girls and boys – study without fans or lights. More than 150 underprivileged boys lodge in the madrassa’s hostels, which are also without any electricity.
“Summers are very hot here in the chars, we get tired easily during classes,” said Taslima. “Most of my friends fall sick in peak summer.”
Ideal scheme
In October, The Third Pole filed Right to Information requests with Assam Power Distribution Company Limited to find out the coverage of decentralised renewable energy solar energy schemes in rural areas of Assam. The responses received indicated, at least on paper, that the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana scheme has secured 100% coverage in almost all villages across Assam’s 31 districts. But when The Third Pole visited chars and villages in Assam’s Dhubri and Kamrup rural districts, the reality was very different.
In early 2022, Azhar Ali, a homestead farmer from the char of Magua Bilar Pathar in Kamrup, received a solar panel, controller and battery unit from the government under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana scheme. Three months later, cracks appeared in his controller box and the system stopped working.
With the controller box broken, Ali connected his solar panel directly to the lithium battery to power his fan and light bulbs. His char being off the grid, this was his only source of electricity. The direct connection, however, meant that the battery could not store energy for use at night. Technicians and experts also do not advise connecting the solar panel directly to the battery as it can overcharge the battery and damage it. But the only expertise Ali had access to was his own.
