A woman in India using a solar-powered sewing machine under solar-powered lighting

A home-based tailor in rural Karnataka works by night with lighting and a sewing machine powered by a SELCO solar system. (Photo courtesy of SELCO Foundation.) 


Some 800 million people globally—as many as a quarter of them in India—have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from modern industrial and digital livelihoods. In short, a key determinant of social equity goes missing. 

Harish Hande, an energy engineer, started SELCO in 1995 to pioneer the delivery of decentralized solar power to India’s rural poor. He built an entire ecosystem around their needs: system designs tailored to their unique demands, affordable financing fit to their cash flow, culturally attuned service providers, and a network of partners dedicated to solving their hyper-specific problems. While other companies shunned the poor as unprofitable, Hande built a profitable business by catering to them. Through the nonprofit SELCO Foundation, he’s now scaling up by nurturing other companies and nonprofits to replicate his model—across India and in other developing countries in Asia and Africa. This episode tells Hande’s story, including:

  • the nature of life without electricity for the rural poor
  • how Hande’s background nurtured his passion for social equity
  • how a chance encounter in the Dominican Republic changed his direction
  • how the poor taught him about the economic and design requirements of their needs
  • why customization works in favor of—not against—serving the poor
  • the perfect storm that nearly killed the company, and how “patient” money saved it
  • how SELCO’s nonprofit foundation works alongside the for-profit business to scale up impact

Additional Resources:

Source articles for this episode include:

A full transcript of the episode is below.

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Narender Verma  00:14

They come from out of nowhere and attack in groups from different directions. The harassment has been constant.

Jonathan Levine  00:25

Narender Verma is an apple farmer from the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India. Over the last decade, his small family orchard has been increasingly threatened by troops of marauding monkeys, sometimes in the hundreds.

Narender Verma  00:43

The branches shake as they jump around. The fruit gets damaged as it falls to the ground and becomes worthless. And it's not just apples—peas, beans, cabbage—all of these crops face destruction.

Jonathan Levine  01:01

These invasions have become endemic in recent years around India and other tropical regions of the world. Some ginger and coconut farmers say they've lost up to 75 percent of their crops, often in a single night. Small, poor farms are hit the hardest. Many have given up the battle altogether. Others have resorted to shooting, poisoning, and sterilizing the monkeys. But Narender is trying something different: a solar-powered monkey repeller.

Narender Verma  01:28

Imagine a loudspeaker mounted on a tall pole with a solar panel on top and sensors to detect motion. Any movement coming from the forest triggers sounds of predators—lions, tigers, wolves, even gunfire and sirens—to scare off the monkeys.

Jonathan Levine  01:57

For two years, Narender has participated in a field pilot of the monkey repeller. It's just one of hundreds of solar-powered solutions developed by a company called SELCO and its partners to solve the problems of India's rural poor. Over the years SELCO has produced basic lighting systems for slum dwellers, solar-powered cookstoves, sewing machines, blacksmith blowers—solutions for just about every problem under the sun, like monkey invasions. Narender says the attacks have noticeably decreased since he installed the repellers. But he's not yet ready to declare victory

Narender Verma  02:36

The truth is the monkeys are very cunning. They gradually get habituated to the sounds and continue to attack.

Jonathan Levine  02:43

It's a work in progress for sure. But for thousands of farmers like Narender, the solution can't come too soon.

Jonathan Levine  02:57

From the Stanford Social Innovation Review at Stanford University, this is Uncharted Ground—stories about the people at the forefront of global development and their journeys in social innovation. I'm Jonathan Levine. Harish Hande started the Solar Electric Light Company, or SELCO in 1995, to bring electricity to the hundreds of millions of India's rural poor who have little or no access to the grid. At the time, solar power was still new and expensive—a luxury only the rich could afford. Most businesses shunned the poor as unprofitable. But Harish made it his business to solve their problems. He tailored the technology to their needs, and worked just as hard to come up with ways for them to pay for it. Today, SELCO is one of—if not the only profitable sustainable energy company in the world that caters to the poor. But for Harish Hande, the mission is far grander than propagating photovoltaic panels around the Indian countryside. It's about social equity and opportunity.

Harish Hande  04:05

Don't think about solar only in terms of 'oh, it's a solar panel and solar batteries.' The democratization of power leads to democratization of ownership, democratization of services like health and education. Solar for us is the essence of society in a true democracy. That is for us what solar means.

Jonathan Levine  04:28

Nearly 800 million people globally, or one in 10, have no access to electricity. And untold millions more have only sporadic, unreliable access because of routine brownouts and power cuts. Billions of people still rely on wood or charcoal or animal waste for cooking and heating. And all that indoor air pollution kills more than 4 million people every year. But it's not only health that's affected by the lack of electricity. Just about every aspect of modern life is compromised. Children can't study and learn in the evenings. Entire communities are cut off from economic opportunities. In India, the World Bank says officially, about 30 million rural people still have no electricity—and that's despite recent gains in rural electrification. But India severely over-counts electrical connections, so some estimates put the real number at four to six times higher.

Sourav Mukherji  05:30

The countryside was so dark, I had never seen so much of darkness in my life.

Jonathan Levine  05:34

Sourav Mukherji is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management. Many years ago, he made a tour of rural Indian villages with Harish Hande for a case study he wrote about SELCO. And he was stunned by the under-development, and the health risks.

Sourav Mukherji  05:50

It's a very common sight even today that women in the evening are carrying these loads of twigs and leaves on their head. You burn it, it will emit smoke. Long-term it will give you lung problem. It will cover your kitchen with black soot.

Jonathan Levine  06:06

As for Harish Hande, he saw a different dimension of the electricity problem—the lifelong disadvantages.

Harish Hande  06:13

It was more than just the darkness. What stayed with me was the starting point for the people in the villages. The starting point in a career, education, livelihoods was so different to my own starting point. So it's like running a 100-meters race, and I was already at 50 meters and others were at minus 50.

Jonathan Levine  06:43

Our reporter in southern India, Anupama Chandrasekaran, met up with Harish to explore his background and how it shaped his perspective. And she found that his ideas about social equity were nurtured in—of all places—a coal-fired power plant.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  07:05

Harish grew up in Rourkela. It's a planned company town in east India where his father was in charge of power generation for a state-owned steel factory. He describes it as a childhood steeped in equality, free of caste and religious differences that dominated other parts of the country. Thanks to the company's hiring policies, other educated families like his were brought into the town, and he says everyone he knew was on equal footing.

Harish Hande  07:33

Being a company town, religious differences, casteism, were not there.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  07:38

Or so it seemed. In fact, the town was located in a rural tribal area where the local people made a living from subsistence farming. But they couldn't get jobs in the factory. As Harish got older, he realized the disparity between his own privileged life and theirs, and it made a deep impression on him.

Harish Hande  07:58

And that was the irony, right? The very people who were original residents could only get job as cleaning people's houses and menial labor job, but not better-paid jobs because they were not qualified. And that's because the education system had not reached them. And so that was a paradox.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  08:25

In 1986, Harish started studies in sustainable energy at the famed Indian Institute of Technology. It was a cutting-edge curriculum at the time, he says, not only in the way it combined mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering courses but also because it put the user's needs at the center of technical design.

Harish Hande  08:46

That was very futuristic thinking. It was the cross-cutting nature of education that a lot of the schools are going to today. And the human-centric design thought process today SELCO does, has a root in that philosophy many, many years ago.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  09:04

He went on to earn his PhD in energy engineering at the University of Massachusetts. And while he was on a field trip to the Dominican Republic in 1991, Harish met an American engineer named Richard Hansen. He was a solar energy pioneer, and his innovations would change Harish's academic direction—and his life's work. Harish's thesis at the time focused on transferring heat in big centralized thermal power stations. But Hansen had taken the exact opposite approach, rigging up standalone solar panels to power individual houses. At a time when solar equipment was still new and wildly expensive, he got microfinance organizations to make loans to people even more impoverished than the tribal villages Harish had seen in India.

Harish Hande  09:55

It was not more than 10 houses that he had put up. And out of that, five houses were paying for his efforts. And so under those conditions, if those four or five people were paying for it—and very, very poor farmers were paying for it—that showed there's something in that. I mean, that was a spark.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  10:17

Harish became convinced that the standalone solar model could work in India. He dumped his thesis, refocused on rural electrification, and returned to South Asia to do field research. For six months, he lived among remote villagers in Sri Lanka trying to understand their lighting needs. He also studied their spending patterns and social dynamics. One day, he sat listening as a whole group told him that they would have no money for three months until their banana crops were ready to harvest.

Harish Hande  10:48

But very next day, some of them had to go for a wedding far away. Suddenly, the cash came up.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  10:56

Somehow, they found the money to make the trip.

Harish Hande  10:59

The question was, how did the willingness to pay change? It was not on the basis of economics, but basis of emotions. Yesterday, they said they had no money. Today, where did the money come from? I think the biggest learning for me in Sri Lanka was if you could emotionally connect, you could be part of the problem. I mean, in a good way.

Jonathan Levine  11:29

It was a good lesson in behavioral economics—about understanding the real drivers behind the decision-making of the poor. And it became a guiding principle of SELCO. In 1995, Harish started the company with a partner he'd met in Massachusetts, the head of a nonprofit solar advocacy organization. The partner had raised grant funds from big foundations. But Harish was wary of becoming dependent on donors. And besides, the more he learned about what drove the poor to buy, the more confident he was that rural customers would pay for solar lights and be able to support a for-profit company.

Harish Hande  12:06

So I said, let's start a company that was truly grassroot-run, owned, decided by the grassroot.

Jonathan Levine  12:14

The problem was he didn't have a rupee of working capital to his name. So he persuaded a local solar panel supplier to sell him systems on credit, one or two at a time. And for two years, he traveled around his home state of Karnataka, sleeping in buses overnight to reach remote villages, where he sold light systems to anyone who could afford them. Along the way, he studied the needs of poor clients. One of his biggest lessons came from a street cart vendor in Bangalore named Savita. She was paying 15 rupees a day, or about 20 cents for kerosene to light her cart at night. So Harish offered her a solar system at 300 rupees a month. It was a cleaner, brighter light, and also about a third cheaper than kerosene over the course of a month. But for Savita, it was a non-starter,

Harish Hande  13:03

And then she would say, '300 rupees a month is expensive, but 10 rupees a day is fine.'

Jonathan Levine  13:09

That's when Harish learned his first big lesson: That to sell lights to the poor, he'd also have to offer financing with a daily payment plan that fit their cash flow. Of course, finding financing for the poor was tricky. But Sourav Mukherji, the business professor from the Indian Institute of Management, says the solar lights come with their own solution, because they provide an asset that bankers are more likely to lend against.

Sourav Mukherji  13:36

This solar light is an asset. Now when you have an asset, a lender will be much more comfortable to give you a loan. The moment you give an asset to a poor person, he becomes a loanable customer.

Jonathan Levine  13:53

Take for example, Ramsingh Kabadi. He's a tailor from the state of Odisha and a member of the Gondi community, one of the poorest indigenous groups in the country. Ramsingh used to work on a manual sewing machine supporting his family of seven on about $50 a month. Orders were good, he says, but he was constantly falling behind, and moving up to an electric machine was out of the question. The cost was high and the power supply in his remote village was too erratic. And then, Ramsingh says, everything changed.

Ramsingh Kabadi  14:28

SELCO had just started working in my area and recommended that I consider a solar-powered sewing machine.

Jonathan Levine  14:36

To pay for it, SELCO worked up a loan proposal and connected him to a local bank that offered a payment scheme for microenterprises. But access to bank credit has always been a challenge for indigenous people like Ramsingh.

Ramsingh Kabadi  14:52

I was a bit nervous about connecting with any bank, but SELCO officials took me along and spoke to the managers on my behalf.

Jonathan Levine  14:59

With a $250 loan paid back in $9 monthly installments, Ramsingh bought a  SELCO solar-powered sewing machine and lights to work at night. Within months, his productivity doubled and so did his income. After six months of on-time loan payments, the bank lent him money for a second machine, so he could bring his brother into the business. And just recently, he applied for a third loan to buy a solar-powered rice hulling machine to help diversify his income.

Ramsingh Kabadi  15:31

I never used to interact with bankers since I live in a remote area. But I traveled every month to the bank branch to pay the installments, and I built a relationship with the banker.

Jonathan Levine  15:43

Today there are thousands of microentrepreneurs like Ramsingh around southern India with bank credit built on the income generated by solar-powered equipment. Tailors, photocopy shops, farmers, and blacksmiths—all are able to work longer hours and more productively because they have reliable power. And they illustrate another key lesson from Harish's journey: Don't think of the poor as energy consumers, he says. Think of them as owners of an asset that can generate income. As early as 2010, Harish estimates more than 20 percent of SELCO's customers were generating extra income because the solar-powered light extended their working hours. And that extra income, in turn, helped the bankers justify lending them the money to pay for it.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  16:35

Harish built up sales in the 1990s, mostly from off-the-shelf home lighting packages, like two or four lights with a solar panel, a charge regulator, and a battery. It made sense to focus on a few standard products with economies of scale to save costs. That's the only way most businesses could make selling to the bottom of the pyramid viable. But as Harish listened more closely to his customers, he realized how different their needs for electricity were from one another. He remembers trying to sell a small light system to a slum dweller, a maid who earned less than a dollar a day. She couldn't afford the standard package. But when he finally understood her motivation, he says she didn't really want a lighting system at all. She simply needed two hours of light at night so her daughter could study. Then he asked her another question.

Harish Hande  17:30

I said, 'Why do you also send your kid to school?' She said 'you get free meals.'

Anupama Chandrasekaran  17:37

The government encouraged parents to educate their kids by offering free school lunches.

Harish Hande  17:42

And that was, we thought, a very clever move by the government to have that. We said 'why don't we use the same concept for lighting?' Why can't solar panel—at that point of time the most expensive part of the product—be part of the school's education infrastructure? And the battery, which was very small, could be kept at home. So just like a kid would go to school for eating lunch, can we incentivize them to go to the school to charge your battery?

Anupama Chandrasekaran  18:16

By splitting the asset into two parts and sharing the cost with the school, the lights and battery became affordable even for that poor mother. And by carefully designing a solution around her needs, it also eventually met the needs of thousands of other parents. Today, that solution is itself a standard SELCO product. It's known as the Light for Education Project, and some 450,000 children around southern India use it to bring light home from school. Still, convincing financial institutions to lend to the poor for solar lights was a tough sell. Harish spent years cultivating banks, nonprofits, micro finance, and government assistance programs, pushing them to develop lease-to-own and other schemes to make the lights affordable.

Harish Hande  19:10

We don't realize that 60 percent of our population is informal—very haphazard in terms of the incomes.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  19:18

And those haphazard incomes were too unpredictable for bankers because they had no collateral or consistent transactions with which to repay a bank loan. So Harish wondered:

Harish Hande  19:30

Can we create particular financial products or particular mechanisms to make sure that the collections for the bank happen?

Anupama Chandrasekaran  19:40

That's when SELCO got creative. It found microentrepreneurs and set them up in business as intermediaries. They rent out solar lights for a few rupees a day to the street vendors, the cleaners, individual households, anyone who couldn't afford to buy the lights on their own, and then they repay the bank loan with the proceeds. If banks refused to finance the microentrepreneurs, SELCO would get nonprofit partners or community groups to guarantee the loans, or government agencies to subsidize the down payments.

Harish Hande  20:12

So we created an entrepreneur in the middle who would collect money on behalf of the bank. So you give the money via the entrepreneur or through the community groups, for example.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  20:21

Eventually, some banks started to see the light. One institution, part of an association committed to empowering poor women, even sought out SELCO as the technology partner to develop new products for its members. And today, some 10,000 microentrepreneurs are renting out solar lights, making their neighbors’ nights a little brighter.

Jonathan Levine  20:48

Customizing products to customers’ needs—both technical and financial—became a SELCO hallmark.

Huda Jaffer  20:55

A lot of times when people design solutions for the bottom of the pyramid, they basically avoid customization, right?

Jonathan Levine  21:03

Huda Jaffer is the lead designer at SELCO.

Huda Jaffer  21:07

There is an assumption that the more you need to customize, the cost goes higher. But this is precisely the reason why it works so well.

Jonathan Levine  21:15

For one thing, Huda explains that personalizing the technology to each customer is important to gain the trust that poor clients need to invest in the technology. And customizing the solar-powered lights or business equipment usually results in higher incomes for them. So it generates strong word-of-mouth marketing for SELCO. Any extra costs are often covered by SELCO's nonprofit foundation—we'll get to that part in a bit. And the technicians they hire and train come from rural communities where they work. So they're not only lower cost; they also go to great pains to make sure the product fits each client's need, but not more than they need.

Huda Jaffer  21:55

Every single technician is not just somebody who goes and puts in a plug and play but is actually somebody who designs the lighting in a person's household, in an institution. They do a lot of social mapping in terms of what are the cultural needs, what are the aspirations.

Jonathan Levine  22:10

By the early 2000s, inquiries were rolling in from all sorts of small businesses, and SELCO figured out how to solve their unusual problems—problems that other companies wrote off as unprofitable. For example, they came up with solutions for everyone from silkworm growers to makers of cricket bats, even a solar-powered headlamp to help midwives deliver babies at night. With each problem, SELCO learned to adapt. Harish remembers one day he was demonstrating a system of bright white lights for a group of street vendors

Harish Hande  22:44

And the banana vendor would come up and say 'I do not want a white light. Do you have yellow lights so that the spots in a banana would not be visible?' See, the thing is poverty, sustainability, development are moving variables. And there is no set path to any of this that you can actually solve it. You have to adapt. And our inspiration has been the poor, who adapt every day. Today the streets are flooded. Tomorrow there is no water. How do they keep adapting?

Jonathan Levine  23:19

Sometimes customization meant redesigning the solar gear. And sometimes it meant reengineering a customer's own equipment to make it run on solar power.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  23:34

Down this long road in a lush forest in south India is the valley of Sittilingi, home to several dozen indigenous farming families. Just off the road in a low-slung building of mud bricks is the Porgai Artisans Association. It's an embroidery workshop that provides work for about 60 local women. Until a few years ago, electric supply was sporadic. Lights and sewing machines operated only a couple of hours a day, and not at all during summer months when power demand peaks.

Lalitha Regi  24:09

Most of the time we have to sit idle because the voltage is not sufficient for the sewing machines to work.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  24:15

Lalitha Regi is an obstetrician at the nearby hospital, and she also runs the shop. She says the power was so bad, they often had to outsource orders for embroidered blouses and sarees to other providers, losing precious income for the women. But then she heard about SELCO and within a week, a team of technicians was peppering her embroiderers with questions about every detail of their power needs and workflow. Huda Jaffer, the SELCO designer, says the machines' old 250-watt AC motors put out far more power than they needed. So SELCO technicians retrofitted them with more efficient 60-watt DC motors.

Huda Jaffer  24:15

What we realized is that you don't need more than 60 watts for the same purpose—the rugged nature of stitching that is needed, the longer time of stitching that is needed. With the 60 watts you can do the same function.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  25:14

By reducing the power required by the sewing machines, the whole operation, including lights and fans in the building, could run on fewer solar batteries at less cost. The workshop has been a beehive of activity ever since.

Lalitha Regi  25:32

In the last three years, 99 percent of the sewing is being done here. All that inconvenience, which was happening earlier, is sorted out now with the simple solution of solar-powering our machines.

Jonathan Levine  25:53

The SELCO journey has not always been a smooth ride, and at one point veered on the brink of disaster. By 2005, the company, based in the southern city of Bangalore, had reached more than half a million people by electrifying some 80,000 homes, microenterprises, and community facilities. That made it one of the biggest solar providers in the world, and modestly profitable. Along the way, Harish had raised loans from the US Agency for International Development and the International Finance Corporation, and European investors had put in additional equity. But then came a series of events that nearly wiped out the company. At the time, SELCO was trying to ramp up operations through a new network of independent resellers when, out of the blue, Germany started subsidizing solar panels. That created a global shortage that jacked up prices by nearly 50 percent.

Harish Hande  26:47

We had a debt of a million dollars, so the debt was hanging. The existing shareholders were under a lot of pressure to sell the company.

Jonathan Levine  26:57

And on top of it all, the new network of resellers were failing to make their sales targets. And that left SELCO with a pile of unsold inventory. The company's investors refused to put up any more funds. And so with barely three months of cash left in the bank, Harish had no choice but to slash operations and restructure the business. Then one day...

Harish Hande  27:19

There was an impact investor who came and said, 'we'll give you a million dollars.' And we refused. And I think that was the best decision we ever took in our life. Next day, one of my colleagues actually said, 'let's publicize that we said no.' And that worked out excellent because we got investors who were shocked that we said no to this person. That means they thought we were the right portfolio for them.

Jonathan Levine  27:48

That public announcement intrigued a group of social investors led by the Swiss-based Good Energies Foundation, and eventually they put in a new slug of capital. The group was committed to renewable energy and helping the poor mitigate the impacts of climate change. And they required only minimal financial return. In other words, patient money with SELCO's mission at heart. The lesson, Harish says, is that when you're a for-profit business selling to the poor, choose investors who prioritize impact over profit. It took SELCO four years of losses to climb out of the hole. But by 2009, it turned profitable again, and the rally has continued ever since. In 2021, revenue reached nearly $13 million and a record net profit of more than 10 percent.

Jonathan Levine  28:36

A lot of SELCO's progress stems from several strategic moves it made after the team did some soul searching about their near-death experience. For one thing, they realized that their markets in underserved communities—usually poor people in hard-to-reach places—don't attract many other private businesses. So a lot of the infrastructure needed for development just doesn't exist there. Weak supply chains need to be bolstered. Workers need to be trained. Local bankers have to be cajoled to create financing mechanisms for the poor. And basic technology needs to be developed for local occupations. All of these things are needed by the market in general. But in many areas, SELCO was footing the costs on its own.

Harish Hande  29:24

So-called business—the way the business is defined—it's like everybody wants to go and eat at the buffet. And nobody actually wants to create the infrastructure to make the buffet happen. And so who pays for the cost of designing buffets?

Jonathan Levine  29:45

The answer, they decided, was to set up a philanthropic foundation to pay for those common infrastructure costs—technical innovations, new customer-finance and distribution models, worker training programs. And they'd make them available to any business that could use them. SELCO India, the core for-profit commercial enterprise, would have equal access, but not preferential treatment. And so in 2010, SELCO formed the SELCO Foundation. It was such an important move that Harish gave up the managing director position at SELCO India to head up the foundation. And Rachita Misra, the foundation's advocacy manager, says they got the company's social investors, along with the government of India, to fund it.

Rachita Misra  30:29

We need to cover our costs and show profitability. But we are not going to ask our end users to pay for our R&D. It needs to be philanthropic monies.

Jonathan Levine  30:39

The company's failed attempt to grow through independent resellers also got SELCO thinking about a better way to increase its impact. And its core, Harish says, the company's mission was to solve poor people's problems around basic needs—livelihoods, education, health...

Harish Hande  30:55

And for that one needed to articulate the problem from the end user's perspective. And that solution was very much embedded in the social structure and cultural structure.

Jonathan Levine  31:08

The problem was, in a country of 1.4 billion people who speak nearly 2,000 different languages and dialects, many social and cultural customs vary from state to state, even community to community,

Harish Hande  31:22

One company would not be able to create an organization that could understand the different cultures in India itself, forget the world. So it was very critical to create decentralized businesses. That means decentralized entrepreneurship. That means you needed a channel to inspire these potential entrepreneurs—to get money, mentorship, and a shoulder to cry on, I would say in many times. And that is where we said it's not about SELCO scaling up. It is a process of scaling up and numerous other organizations adopting the process.

Jonathan Levine  32:01

So in 2012, SELCO started up a business incubation unit as part of the foundation. The group nurtures new entrepreneurial businesses, basically a lot of mini-SELCOs, serving the rural poor by designing and selling their own products to hyper-local markets or with very specific needs.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  32:20

A good example is Katidhan. That's the small company of engineers who created the monkey repeller at the beginning of our episode. They bill themselves as a wildlife technology company dedicated to creating harmony between humans and wildlife—snow leopards, wolves, elephants. But Huda Jaffer says it was the monkeys that got SELCO's attention.

Huda Jaffer  32:43

In rural areas, if you go for any farmer meeting, it will always come out as one of the main issues: Can we do something about the monkeys?

Anupama Chandrasekaran  32:51

Katidhan knew how to create solutions. But as a startup, it needed mentoring on marketing, business development, and other key business functions—not to mention help integrating its products with solar power. Katidhan's director, SR Ayan, says that's when they turned to SELCO.

SR Ayan  33:10

The first set of end-user customers we got through SELCO. After the success of that, SELCO wanted us to take it forward and see how it works before re-approaching them for the next stage. And of course, we did.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  33:23

Now he says Katidhan's products are selling in more than 10 states across India.

SR Ayan  33:29

This all started with the initial help and support that we got through SELCO.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  33:33

So far SELCO has incubated some 45 small companies. It's even started an investment fund to help finance the growth. All told SELCO has reached more than 11 million lives in India with its solar solutions, from lighting systems to vaccine refrigeration units—that's one of the many recent innovations prompted by the COVID pandemic. In the past few years, SELCO Foundation has extended its footprint overseas, too. It's training organizations to replicate SELCO's model in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and the Philippines—countries like India with an abundance of sunshine and rural poor. MS Sriram, one of SELCO's directors, says it's a bold move to transplant nearly the entire ecosystem SELCO has built up in India over 25 years, from technology and design to finance and service.

MS Sriram  34:37

If you want to learn from us, here is a model. You might want to do it in your culture, in your setting, in your way.

Anupama Chandrasekaran  34:44

But there's one key ingredient of this not-so-secret sauce that he's not so sure will translate.

MS Sriram  34:50

Scaling up can easily be, you know, replication of the blueprint. But can you replicate the culture of the organization? That is the question.

Jonathan Levine  35:02

For sure, the SELCO culture is fine-tuned to its mission and hyper-focused on solving customers' problems. To really understand the poor's needs, Harish says, it helps to come from the same rural culture and mentality. But that's not how most businesses hire.

Harish Hande  35:19

Normal organizations in the world today—they're not inclusive. You have to have certain experience, certain degrees. For us, that was exactly why the world was not developing. So we wanted to break this myth of selection processes based on certain criteria.

Jonathan Levine  35:28

That's why the company's hiring practices consider passion and rural experience as much as technical credentials and education. About half of SELCO's employees grew up in rural villages themselves, including SELCO India's CEO Mohan Hegde, who's a practicing folk artist on the weekends.

Harish Hande  35:55

My colleagues Mohan, Prasanna, Kuru Prakash, everybody comes from the communities where they all own the problems. They know what it actually means. I don't have to explain why light is important, why incomes are important. They know it. They know how to mobilize 100,000 people in one day. They come from where they had the power of the communities, the power of knowing what the problems were, and could actually come up with better solutions.

Jonathan Levine  36:26

A lot of people attribute SELCO's success to its mission-driven business model. But Huda Jaffer has a different take on it.

Huda Jaffer  36:34

It's because of the people. It's because of the vision. It's because of the human-centricity.

Jonathan Levine  36:40

That human-centricity, that goal of social equity aroused in Harish as a child, continues to drive SELCO today to solve problems for people on lower and lower rungs of the economic ladder. For instance, the company recently completed solar-powered energy upgrades to 1,700 primary health clinics in the remotest regions of four states, improving health care for some of the most vulnerable people in the world. And yet, despite the progress, Harish remains deeply troubled by the huge disparities around him. While the "have's" of the world are capitalizing on newer and newer technologies, he says, the "have-nots" still struggle with the basics of life. So how does he feel these days about all the solutions he's brought to disadvantaged people around the country?

Harish Hande  37:30

Conflicted, completely conflicted. In 2021 we're still talking about it. I mean, on one hand, we're talking about blockchain and we're talking about bitcoins. And on another hand, we are saying how can we give a reliable baby warmer or a photocopying machine, right? So excitement on one hand, conflicted thought process on the other hand, and third is frustration—in a sense that we have a lot more to do, and do we have the time?

Jonathan Levine  38:09

Thank you so much for joining us today on our journey to India with SELCO. This is the last episode in our first season. And we really hope you've enjoyed these stories as much as we've loved bringing them to you. We hope they've educated and enlightened you, and maybe even inspired your own participation in some kind of social venture. If so, or if you have any other comments about the podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Just go to ssir.org/unchartedground and find the comment link at the top of any of the episode pages. Or email us at [email protected].  If you haven't listened yet to any of the previous seven episodes, please check them out and subscribe to Uncharted Ground on any of the podcast platforms out there—Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and many others. And please give us a rating on those sites. It'll help more people to find out about us. This episode was reported by Anupama Chandrasekaran and written and produced by me. Jennifer Goren edited the story. Tina Tobey Mack provided sound editing and design. VJ Rougeau provided the English voices of the Indian language speakers. And Barbara Wheeler-Bride and Bryan Maygers manage our audience development. Our thanks to Harish Hande and his entire team at SELCO and SELCO Foundation for sharing their story with us. Uncharted Ground is produced and distributed in partnership with the Stanford Social Innovation Review at Stanford University, and online at ssir.org. I'm Jonathan Levine and you've been on Uncharted Ground.