Army lighting hills in J&K

OPED

TThe Tribune July 29, 2004

Electricity from water mills
An innovative experiment to generate power
by S.P. Sharma

Dr Anil Prakash Joshi explains the functioning of a water mill to Army officers

The villages along the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan that have become a hot bed of terrorism can now hope to have electricity of their own in case the innovative experiment of Dr Anil Prakash Joshi to generate power through the traditional water mills succeeds in the area.

The Northern Command of the Army has adopted the mechanism to modify the water mills introduced by Dr Joshi and is all set to make electricity available to the remote villages where the reach of the power development department of the J&K government is nowhere in sight.

The technology to generate electricity from the existing water mills that grind wheat for the villagers is not expensive. It costs around Rs 37,000 and the engineers of the Army were trying to cut the cost. It requires only replacing the traditional wooden shaft with a steel fabricated one, some belts and pulleys and an alternator to generate 1 to 8 KWs of electricity that is sufficient to electrify with one bulb about 100 households and also run a lathe and a wool combing machine.

Under the technique, the traditional "gharats" in the villages will not only grind the corn, but also generate electricity.

There was enthusiasm among the villagers to adopt the scheme that was environment friendly. The water mills have so far electrified the two villages of Barsada and Kulali in the Hillkaka area of Poonch and five others in the Kashmir valley where the terrorists virtually ruled till the past few months. The Army has identified about 80,000 water mills that were capable of electrifying the remote areas of Jammu and Kashmir. The Army has provided electricity to some villages by installing diesel generator sets, but that was an expensive proposition because of the recurring cost. Diesel has to be carried to certain areas in helicopters. But the water mills require only a one-time investment.

The engineers of the Army are fabricating the turbines and shafts and all this is being done under the "Operation Sadhbhavana" that has been launched by the Northern Command for the uplift of the villagers who were the worst victims of terrorism. By launching the operation under which not only electricity was being provided free of cost by the Army, several development works have been undertaken and children of the remote villages have been adopted by the Army to educate them in high quality institutions.

The credit for the thrust in such social welfare activity by the Army goes to Lt. Gen. Hari Prasad, GOC-in-C of the Northern Command. He has been taking personal interest in such activity.

The idea of getting the water mills modified struck the Army commander when he came across an article on the works of Dr Joshi in a book entitled "Prophets of New India". He immediately invited Dr Joshi here and discussed the modalities with him. Dr Joshi was providing knowhow free of cost to the Army.

Dr Joshi says that his dream was to create a mass movement at the grassroots level to modify the water mills to generate a substantial amount of electricity in the country. There were at least two lakh water mills in the sub-Himalayan region of the country that were capable of generating electricity for consumption on the local villages without depending on the large power projects.

He laments that although there was ample hidden raw material for progress, India has turned into a country of shortages and problems because we have not respected the traditions and are running after modern techniques. The villages were capable of being self-sufficient in every thing, but youth are shy of going to the places where their roots are. The mountains are rich in resources, but the people living there are the poorest in the country.

Dr Joshi says that he was in constant touch with the Planning Commission and pressuring the policy makers to invest in schemes that were rural friendly and not controlled from the urban areas.

He says steps should be taken to produce fruit products in the rural areas. About 50 per cent fruit gets destroyed in J&K, Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal every year. He has helped the local villagers establish groups for preserving fruit.

Dr Joshi, who was born in the Kotdwar village of Uttaranchal, quit his job as a Reader in the government college and took up works to use science and technology to solve the basic needs of the mountain people. He was declared "Man of the year" for 2002 by "The Week" magazine. He has been awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award by the Indian Science Congress in 1999 and also received Social Science Award for the year 2001 from Shri Ram Washeshran Devi Bhatia Memorial Charitable Trust.

He set about the task of checking the menace of landslides in 1979 through botanical methods controlling 30 major slides. The Border Roads Organisation took his technical advice to check landslides in Garhwal.

He has established the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organisation (HESCO) at Dehra Dun to guide development of the mountainous region.