Over the next few weeks I'll share some profiles of social entrepreneurs I visited during my trip to India in March. For the first one, I had the opportunity to visit the campus at the THRIVE rural entrepreneur training program about 80 kilometers outside Hyderabad at the village of Chintapalli, of the Nalgonda District, Andhra Pradesh. I'd use some of my pictures, but the ones they have at their website are better.

Our group came about mid-afternoon and visited with members of THRIVE who gave us a tour of their campus and showed us some of their projects including solar powered Internet kiosks, Solar powered DTH based television for rural areas, and water monitoring and weather forecasting stations to help farmers better manage their crops. Around dark we were able to see one of their main projects first hand, LED based home lighting. One of their proposals for LED use as clean and reliable home lighting made it to the Finals of the Development Marketplace Awards Competition to be held next month in Washington, D.C.

This from their website:
LED lights powered by solar power provide very ideal source with very low power consumption and long life. According to our estimate a 50 hamlet village can be provided with 12hrs lighting a day with just 1 Lakh Rs. investment whereas power lines from distant hub cost nothing less than 20 Lakhs and need maintenance and community has to pay for it and then there are line losses and all sorts of things associated with grid power. Thrive has powered around 12 tribal hamlets and 7 rural institutes with LED lights. A small village costs 60000 and an institute 20,000. This innovation is now ready for large-scale dissemination in around 1000 remote villages of AP, Orissa, Chattisgarh. President of India commended thrive efforts on LED lighting and called for large scale implementation.

It certainly seems like a worthy project and their campus is idyllic if you are in the Hyderabad area and want to go visit them. I'm sure they'd be happy to oblige. They even managed to run a projector for a slide show of images they'd been shooting around the THRIVE campus. There are almost too many activities that THRIVE is involved with for me to go into here, so check out their website to get a better idea. India could use thousands of similar institutions around the country to better support rural development in a sustainable and entrepreneurial way.