Battery Brigades

There are over 1.6 billion people in the world who do not have access to electricity, and have to rely upon kerosene lamps to get lighting. This not only adversely affects productivity by cutting down on the number of working hours, but it is also environmentally unfriendly. In a few places, villagers have been getting around the problem by acquiring used car batteries, and then lugging them to-and-from cities for recharging. However, common methods for recharging reduce the battery life and are wasteful.

Prof. Vijay Modi's team from Columbia University has developed a lunch-box sized battery unit which can attach to a fluorescent lantern and supply light for 4 hours. The unit is portable and can be carried to a especially designed diesel generator driven recharging unit, one in each village. The recharger reduces cost by recharging many batteries at once. The best part with the proposal however is the suggestion that this recharging unit should be placed in schools, so that children can come back and forth with their battery packs for recharging. This will give an incentive to the families to send their children to school!
Dr. Modi has also written a report on the electrification of villages in India.