Electricity consumption for lighting is one of the prime leading indicators of development of emerging economies. Access to energy and information has been proved to be very instrumental in overall human development, thus necessitating improved access to good quality energy and information to all households. Light in the form of bulbs, is one of the first applications of electricity, dating more than 200 years back. However, in India, when darkness falls, nearly 40 million households are left with no option but to resort to kerosene lamps for lighting.
Apart from being extremely inconvenient to use and dangerous, kerosene lamps provide a very severe threat to the households by emitting toxic fumes and particulate matter during operation. Research says, spending a few hours with a kerosene lamp causes the same damage to someone’s lungs as smoking 40 cigarettes causing lung and other respiratory infections in the longer run due to inhaling of toxic fumes emitted by kerosene lamps. The women of these households generally suffer the most as they spend almost all their time inside their homes doing households chores. In addition to that, the children are forced to study and finish their homework under the dim light of the kerosene lamp with brightness level 20 times lesser than standard making them more prone to eye related strains and chronic headaches.
To put things in perspective, there are around 40 million off-grid households in India who are completely dependent on kerosene for lighting and 60 million grid underserved households who get electricity supply for only 2-8 hours each day. These households are home to around 100 million children who lack access to basic clean energy and information. These children are growing under the shadows of kerosene lamps which is one of the major impediments to the brighter future of these children.
The solutions currently offered to these Base of Pyramid (BoP) consumers are either highly compromised in utility, or are unaffordable for them. Generally, these options also lack basic repairing and servicing making it a big deal breaker. BoP consumers thus end up paying a disproportionately higher portion of their already humble income for their electricity needs.
With an aim to provide a state-of-the-art product along with prompt and efficient after-sales service taking into consideration all the needs and constraints of our target customers, Bombay Bijlee was incorporated in 2017 to provide a complete end-to-end solution i.e. Solar Panels, Solar Energy Harvester, Storage Device, along with popular loads like LED Bulbs and TV
all with a robust business model. Bombay Bijlee started testing and iterating its prototypes and is currently in the final stages of product development. We have won many awards and are supported by organisations like Villgro-GIZ, Unltd India, Nasscom Social Foundation, Department of Science & Technology (GoI) and IIT Bombay, Acumen Fellowship, IEEE-Empower a Billion Lives -South Asia best track award.
Keeping customer feedback and market surveys in mind, we are using the latest technologies to build “Bijlee Boqx”, an IoT based smart energy harvesting, storage and delivery device. It has an inbuilt self diagnostic hardware which will send alerts to a local technician in case faults are detected, such that service and maintenance can be provided pro-actively and promptly without customer having to raise the issue. Payments via mobile phone are part of the service to ease the effort of customer to pay for the service.
Competitive advantage: Self diagnostic hardware and backend software system which diagnoses any fault in the system and sends an automatic SMS with a brief about most probable issue along with location of household. This will greatly increase the reliability and our customer’s trust in our product and service while saving a lot of time and money for our customers but above all, it will save them the emotional distress of calling, following up and waiting for service in hard to reach locations.
Comments