India’s rural energy pioneers — Global Issues

Salt farming in India is tough work. In Gujarat, girls arrange huts, dig wells, and pump up brine, which they sift by way of a sequence of pans, ultimately crystallising salt. Aside from the pumping, all parts of the method are accomplished by hand. The ladies typically work and not using a contract, and the pay is poor.

The undertaking – a collaboration between the United Nations Surroundings Program (UNEP), India’s main clear vitality firm, “Renew Energy”, the Indian Self-Employed Girls’s Affiliation (SEWA), and the western state of Gujarat – goals to present these girls the talents to construct a brand new, extra rewarding and higher paid profession within the renewable vitality business.

At SEWA coaching centres and Renew Energy services within the state, some 1,000 girls from the area are studying how one can work as photo voltaic panel and photo voltaic pump technicians. They may even obtain technical coaching from the Electronics Sector Abilities Council of India.

“This program is not going to solely assist in creating different livelihoods for our SEWA sisters, but additionally assist to take care of the environmental challenges current in conventional sectors corresponding to salt manufacturing”, says Reema Nanavati, from SEWA, referring to the polluting diesel pumps which can be usually used. “It’ll assist obtain an acceptable shift in the direction of environmental sustainability. And we sit up for increasing this program to different areas of the nation”.

One of many locations the place the ladies may find yourself being employed is at Renew Energy, one of many undertaking companions. “We need to have interaction girls’s curiosity in an business that won’t solely develop, and allow them to turn out to be clear vitality leaders in India”, says Vaishali Sinha, the corporate’s Chief Sustainability Officer.

The undertaking helps efforts to realize numerous Sustainable Growth Objectives – together with gender equality, reasonably priced and clear vitality, respectable work and financial progress, and local weather motion – and world local weather funds are being sought to broaden its scope over the following years, and finance related developments that would result in “inexperienced jobs” and sustainable entrepreneurship actions.

Atul Bagai, head of the UNEP India Workplace, is worked up by the potential to scale up throughout the nation. “We’re delighted to assist these initiatives, alongside corporations like ‘Renew Energy’, and organizations like ‘SEWA’. They play an essential function in tackling local weather change, instructing girls essential abilities, and offering employment.”

This story is a part of multimedia UN Information sequence that includes girls main initiatives for a extra sustainable, equitable future, printed forward of this 12 months’s Worldwide Girls’s Day on 08 March.