World Environment Day
Yesterday was a big day and our office is running an awareness campaign today to commemorate this day. A NGO "Greenpeace" is helping us in this noble cause, by the means of banners, posters and face-to-face interaction. When I was stopped after lunch by one of their volunteers, my first doubt was... will this talk... just talk can have any lasting effect? I was almost sure, not on me atleast... I am a tough a**. But within 2 hours of that submissive introduction from that volunteer, here I am writing this blog after reading thru almost 5 articles from "publications" section of their website "http://www.greenpeace.org".
I am impressed by one of the project report "http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/india/press/reports/solar-lantern-income-generatio.pdf" . Can't we do somthing like that? Your comments are welcome...
Well, I was just thinking that, whenever the topics of these kind of initiatives... (lets take an example of solar energy)... comes, we generally and unknowingly associate their applicability or effectiveness to the rural or under-developed areas. There is a small point to be mentioned, while doing this we somehow make a proposal less economically viable. Lets accept this fact that without any reservations that any means of renewable energy will be costlier in installation and the break-even point of your investment will be a bit longer. I am not denying the very high ROI (return of investment) interms of saving the environment here for some time. So, when we say in a village the residents or the government or a NGO should setup solar enery panels, it means a big investment, little training and some amount of maintenance.... please take motivation and literary status of a typical village into consideration, which makes these implementations a big deal and even more costly. There is one more angle to this picture, do we know how much electricity consuming devices are being used in a common household in a village? I do not think many, compared to a typical urban household. Remember, nearly 80% of power consumption of a village would go in running tube-wells (for irrigation) and thrashers (A farm machine for separating seeds or grain from the husks and straw) and the machines used to accomplish these two tasks need hell lot of power, which cannot be generated using solar energy (I am talking about a typical installation). Ok, we will talk about improving these practices (specially water management) some other time....
Ok, so I was about to propose that instead of targetting rural population for these initiatives, why shouldn't we concentrate more on urban well-offs? Big offices, huge houses and want-to-do-something-different kind of ppl. They have money to spend, they are well aware of its positive impact on environment and they can set it as a new trend in their social circuits. Believe me, power consumption of my office alone would be many times of that of my whole village. And the good thing is there big range of devices right from low-power consuming to high-power consuming, and there are ppl to maintain it.
Yeah, its pretty vague and initial thought of mine, but looks to have some potential, what you say? How can we direct our energy in this direction?
I hope to continue this thread with some more posts...
