Deploying Solar in Sarda Village, Odisha, India

​The absence of a road initiated a journey to a remote village located in a forest in Odisha, India. The village, Sarda Gram Panchayat, is actually a cluster of five villages and is located in a dense forest near the Sambalpur District of Odisha. The remoteness of the villages has severed ties to development work—energy access, education, health facilities and other services all have hit a roadblock. None of the 331 households in the villages have electricity and all of them rely on subsidized kerosene or battery-powered torches for lighting. Given this bleak situation, the government has responded by placing the village under the supervision of Member of Parliament (MP) Nagendra Pradhan through the Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana scheme (SAGY) to actively initiate development. Since its adoption under SAGY, the MP’s key focus has been off-grid solar lighting. The team’s purpose in visiting the villages was to understand if Sarda could be an ideal case for leapfrogging from darkness to accessing light using modern energy services through renewable energy.

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