Feasibility of Implementation of Solar Bottle Bulb in Urban Slums of India

Urban Slums In India: The Target

Approximately 68 million Indians are living in slums^[b], according to a government census in 2011. One in six urban Indians lives in slum housing that is cramped, unclean, not properly lit even during the day. The report prepared from data collected for 2011 national census looks at urban slums in around 4000 towns across India. The electricity being used in these households are mostly illegal – electricity supplies.

Three types of slums have been defined in Census, namely, Notified, Recognized and Identified.

• i.

  All notified areas in a town or city notified as ‘Slum’ by State, Union territories Administration or Local Government under any Act including a ‘Slum Act’ may be considered as Notified slums.

• ii.

  All areas recognised as ‘Slum’ by State, Union territories Administration or Local Government, Housing and Slum Boards, which may have not been formally notified as slum under any act may be considered as Recognized slums.

• iii.

  A compact area of at least 300 population or about 60-70 households of poorly built congested tenements, in unhygienic environment usually with inadequate infrastructure and lacking in proper sanitary and drinking water facilities may be considered as Identified slums. (See Figures 4 & 5: Slum reported towns & slum wise population in India)

Mumbai leads the chart for slum dwellers: 41% of its 20.5 million people. But in percentage terms, the coastal city of Vishakhapatnam overtakes the financial capital. (See Figure 6: Distribution of slums in India). According to that report one-third of studied slum households in India do not have toilets, but have mobile phones and televisions. This statistics shows an essential characteristic of general masses that live in slums. Lack of education and awareness hampers their growth prospects and they give more importance to not so important commodity like a mobile phone over a greener and cheaper source of power. In the future, this mind-set of slum dwellers could create a problem in reaching to them for implementation of Solar Bottle Bulb.

Both of them knew that this was quite an untapped market because they had come across a census report which read that out of 1.73 crore census houses reported, 1.37 crore are slum households. Need of cheap source of lighting wold be very high in this segment of population because of frequent power cuts? The issue of affording uninterrupted power supply was also a major concern because of low income levels of this segment. Most importantly 90% of slum households use electricity as the main source of power, out of which 20% is the stolen power supply