FRIUNKOTI(ROHRU): Pawan Sharma is no IITian, no engineer. In fact, he is a school dropout, a village priest and a house wireman, who got a new life after the PGI cardiologists cured his hole in his heart in 2000. Now at 30, Pawan is a “nano green energy man of the mountain stream” in his own right !
He has done something that no one has done before: Pawan has produced 200 watts of green electricity on a village Nalla that now lights his house in Friunkoti village in Nawar valley,of Rohru in Shimla district.
“I am happy now. My trial run is successful. My “power house” is producing 200 watts of Bijli that comes to about six units in 24 hours. “It lights 8 to 10 bulbs in my house”, says elated Pawan after he comes back from performing his daily duty of a pujari of local devi and devta temples of the area.
To avoid hassles of various clearances from any government agency, Pawan has set up his nano power house in his own land. His green startup promises to produce 5 kilowatt of green electricity that is enough to light the entire village.
Pawan has spent just Rs 1500 on his project. He created no tunnel, submerged no plant or tree, constructed no road and displaced none for his “nano green energy project”.
Even more amazing is that Pawan did not read any books and laws of Physics for his project. “I had learnt in my class 7th and 8th at my village school that when a motor rotates it produces a magnetic field”, he says.
“It struck my mind that I can produce electricity from this magnetic field. It became my mission since then”, Pawan says.
It has never been an easy-going for Pawan since his childhood: He had a congenital hole in his heart. His poor parents spent all their savings on his treatment. But he got a new lease of life when the cardiologists at PGI, Chandigarh, performed a successful surgery on him in 2000.
He passed his Matriculation from the village government school in 2008. But he chose to drop out from school to support his parents. His father was a pujari of local Devta temple, who could not walk due to his physical weakness.
“I learnt my wiring work and did my diploma of an electrician from ITI Rohru and side by side did my house electric fitting work to support my family”, he says.
Pawan took over the duties of pujari of Chandika Devi and Ghordu Devta of the area and relieved his father of the burden. The village falls in Pujarali No 4 of Nawar valley, a major apple belt of Shimla district.
But his childhood dream kept on jogging up his memory. He kept on picking up thread after thread and spun a “cobweb of his dream power project” in his mind to give it a shape recently.
One fine day, Pawan picked up an abandoned bicycle tyre from a nearby town. He drilled 10 holes in it and fixed 10 tin flaps in the holes. The rushing water strikes the tin flaps rotating his “power wheel”.
This is a first component of his green stream power engineering phase-I. In contrast, our own big hydropower producers call it a pre-investigation stage involving big consultants and big bucks!
In the second stage, he faced another problem: how to rotate it and create a magnetic field.
Pawan found an abandoned power sprayer, which is used for spraying pesticides on apple trees and took out its pulley. He got old piece of sturdy cloth and sewed it up into a tough tight belt that rotates his “system ”.
Further, the question that how to create a water turbine, an alternator or a generator nudged his mind for long. A generator that will convert the motive power of Nalla into electrical power and an alternator that converts mechanical energy into electrical alternating current (AC).
An age old Indian Maruti car came to his aid. Pawan took out an alternator of the aged car. “I turned it into a converter that sends out three-phase alternative current (AC)”, he says.
The pulley, a perforated tyre, car alternator, an old piece of sturdy cloth have become four major components of his dream power project. He took pipes to reroute water upstream of the Nallah to run his power components of his Pahari nano project housed a tiny tin shack.
Pawan wants to upgrade and upscale his nano power house that he created by his unique jugaad technology. “I will put transformer to generate 5 kilowatt or more green energy, which will be enough for entire village”, he says, but he has kept other finer details of his project close to his chest.
But Pawan’s idea is: Small is Beautiful. There are hundreds of streams and nallahs flowing freely down across the mountains in Himachal and other Himalayan hill states. These can be tapped to produce clean and green energy without disturbing local ecosystem.
“Himurja, SJVN or HPSEBL or State Science and Technology and Environment Council should come out and support and empower Pawan’s idea of generating green electricity that use scrap as power components”, says Manoj Kumar, a hydropower expert in Shimla.
These components, in fact, are major electro-mechanical devices of his nano “dream project”. Given institutional support from Research and Development establishment, Pawan’s green energy idea perhaps promises a new hope for recycling the mountains of scrap heaps dumped by the auto non-auto industries, car owners across the country.
Pawan’s idea of green energy”, if tapped, empowered and standardised, can usher into a green power revolution in remote villages. “This green energy idea will not only help save environment, but will also provide free green electricity to villagers at nominal charges”, say ecologists.
(Kuldeep Chauhan is Editor, HimbuMail)
