Last days in India :(

Today is my last day in India. The last moments of my time spent in Ujire were spent with a group of about 25 representatives from a company called SAP, which provides software management solutions. They had come to visit the SELCO lab to learn about solar energy provision, how the social enterprise business model works, and sustainable business.

Myself and Sam each gave a presentation on our projects and how we had ended up in Ujire. Also on the agenda was a short trip to Dharmastala, Anand's Farm and a SELCO Solar installation, which had been installed because although the houses were right next to electricity pylons, they were too high voltage to take electricity from. The owners themselves would have had to pay for the erection of the electricity poles. I was lucky enough to leave Ujire by filling a spare seat they had on their luxury AC bus which took them back to Bangalore last night. I will be waking up at 2.30 tomorrow morning to travel to the airport and catch my flight back to London & can't wait to start University again.

I thought I'd finish this blog and my last post with several top lists:

Top 5 best experiences:

• Home-stay visit in rural farmhouse

• Having a guide to take us around Mysore (including the Centre for renewable energy and sustainable technologies)

• Masala Dosa, Ice Cream & Gobi Manchurian

• Meeting and sharing experiences with everyone in the engineering college hostel

• Transporting testing the solar biomass hybrid dryer.

• Houseboat tour of the Keralan Backwaters

  
  

Top 5 worst experiences:

• 6 hour bumpy overnight bus journey from Dharmastala to Mysore (10.30 – 04.30)

• The day of a strike in Trivandrum

• Walking half an hour back in the rain having forgot my Umbrella.

• Loosing my appetite for Indian Food when not feeling well

• Chundering everywhere

  
  

My top initial annoyances for westerners traveling to India:

• Understanding the Indian head wobble

• A huge number of junk calls and text messages on Indian mobile phones

• The possibility chance that every rickshaw driver might overcharge you.

• Lack of pavements on most roads, combined with the crazy traffic behaviour.

  
  

Top questions asked to me:

• How do you find this place?

• How do you find the food?

• What are you doing here?

  
  

My list of top 5 things India is good at:

• Sustainable food production and agriculture

• Hospitality

• Cheap newspapers

• A workforce who are skilled enough to carry out repairs

• Religious Culture

• Maintaining a high population

• Governmental corruption

  
  

NB. I've definitely missed / forgotten many things from these lists.

Scrumptious Dried Bananas

At last! Smoke-free dried bananas, dried using biomass as a fuel. It took just under 30 hours to dry the bananas using 10 kilograms of wood. As this was an experiment, I recorded the weight of the bananas as they dried to determine the drying rate of the bananas.

Testing – It was great to here that many people liked the bananas, especially their colour and sweetness. When asking a couple of students at the hostel if they liked the bananas, they gave a response which even after 8 weeks, I find very confusing – the Indian head wobble!

The next steps of this project are to test the dryer at various sites around Karnataka.

Over the weekend myself, Sam and some of the students rented a Jeep to take up to Charmaddi, stopping off at various viewpoints and waterfalls along the way. On Sunday we had a relaxing day at the beach – and it didn't rain.

Failure

This week I have developed a cheap, sixteen brick rocket stove which can be used in combination with the dryer, giving good combustion once lit and good temperatures.

This however was the only success. The metalwork in the dryer restricts the flow of smoke through the dryer, causing the food to become smokey, a problem which I have been as yet unable to get around. It is difficult to get good heat exchange, good air flow and a simple design.

I visited a steel workshop today, searching for alternative materials for the dryer. It was amazing to see the complete lack of health and safety procedures, with people arc welding in flip flops and without a face mask... but nobody was hurt while I was there.

Good luck to anyone in the UK who will collect their A-level results tomorrow!

Indian independence day

Yesterday was the day that India celebrates it's independence from the British, so myself and Sam thought the best thing for us to do was go join in with the flag raising ceremony at 8.15 in the morning!

Later, I joined some of the students at the college who had hired a jeep to go to the nearby Didupe falls. Eleven of us all piled into the jeep and were driven along the bumpy road and track as far as we could go. The group walked the last two kilometers. A single track path led up to the base of the falls, but at some points this path became part of the stream, forcing us to wade up through the stream.

Unlike Jog falls, you could get right up close to the bottom of the falls and feel the force of the water and wind pounding against your body, crashing down from above. It was a beautiful spot and well worth the slightly slippy walk up the path to get to it.

Now that the concept of the biomass dryer works, I will be spending much of my time trying to get several made, further reducing the smoke, and trying to reduce the costs by better materials selection. I should be able to run product demo's at some of the SELCO branches to demonstrate the concept and receive feedback for further developments.

House Hopping

On Sunday, I went with two other SELCO interns to a really rural area, in order to interview a number of different farmers about their lives in order to help deliver technology which meets the needs of the customers. The landscape & views of the Western Ghats was stunning!

We were trying to get their thoughts on two products, the solar dryer, and a mobile phone service that would send up to date market prices for produce, preventing them from being ripped off by middle-men. All of the households were very welcoming, and were keen to greet us with snacks and tea. After visiting a few houses I felt very full!

The mobile phone service was perceived as a good idea by most farmers, however the the capacity of the dryer was often too small for their use. A possible future project will be to make a dryer with a capacity of 50 - 100kg rather than 5kg. It was difficult discussing drying when everything around is damp from the monsoon rains. Being able to dry products in the monsoon was definitely perceived as a benefit.

The most incredible experience I had, was staying the night at one of the farmers houses, a friend of one of the local interns. They made us feel so welcome in their house (4 rooms) and fed us a non veg feast. Fish at 5pm, and chicken for dinner at 11. They kept 4 cows, a dozen chickens and owned just over an acre of land, which they grew coconuts, areca, and bananas. Their family lived a very happy, subsistence lifestyle; but a lifestyle which leaves them very vulnerable to outside influences like market price fluctuations and climate change. Only when I woke up, to the sound of a cockerel, did I really appreciate how rural their house was – I had to walk through 2 streams to get to their house.

I've designed a new smoke-proof heat collector and sent the design to be constructed. By Thursday I hope to have dried smoke-free bananas.

Stoves & Heat Exchange

The last few days have been frustrating and time consuming. I have been experimenting with different configurations of heat exchange plates in the dryer (to take heat from a biomass stove and transfer it to air in the drying cabinet) as well as different stove types, including gasifier stoves and rocket stoves. A uniform temperature of around 50 degrees is required to get a good quality product with a short drying time. This is difficult to achieve as wood burns at different rates. I even burnt a hole in the dryer when the temperatures were too high!

Another problem is controlling the smoke. To test this (without a smoke alarm) I tried to dry my sock, which was wet from the monsoon rains. The dryer did dry successfully, but I was left with a very smoky smelling sock. More design changes were needed.

After several experiments and modifications I was able to partially dry some bananas.

Busses, Auto's and Ujire

The last 2 days have been such an experience.

On Saturday lunchtime, I visited the SELCO Head office and saw their examples of the solar lighting systems which they install in areas all over Karnataka State. Some of the financing mechanisms which help people gain access to solar lighting was also explained to me.

On Sunday morning after a very good nights sleep, I took an auto-rickshaw to the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens before navigating my way through Cubbon Park and to the MG Road area. I have found Bangalore is very difficult to navigate through, but the backup is to jump on board one of the many auto's which hurtle up and down the cities streets.

I was conned by one of the rickshaw drivers who initially said he would show me to some of the tourist sights and then drive back to my hotel. After taking me to a few sites he insisted on taking me to a number of shops and once you've entered a shop it is expected that you buy something.

Bangalore's 'Majestic' bus stand was huge. It took some time to find the right platform as it was not signed. I travelled in a Rajahamsa Executive overnight bus (sounds more comfortable than it was.) Once again, I had no real idea where to get off but knew it would be about 5.45am when I should have arrived in Ujire.

This morning, I got off the bus in the dark and in the rain after I had seen the engineering college from the road. Kiran, another intern at SELCO picked me up on his moped taking me to the lodge.

I have now settled in to where I will be working for the next few months, and am trying to learn everything I can about Solar Drying from the previous interns I have a lot of reading to do over the next week.

Pre-Departure Course & 6 days to go.

The excitement is really building as I prepare for my placement. By this time next week, I will be on a plane flying to Bangalore.

The last week I have spent on the EWB-UK placement volunteers training course. We spent the first two days being made aware of (and scared by) all the things which could go wrong on our placements, including health problems and security threats. This included an activity involving spotting landmines - I'm hoping I won't come across any of them! The latter half of the course looked at participatory tools in development, and project management. The course ended with one of the best metaphores for learning about development, and one which I will remember for a long time to come.
I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped put on the course and I wish all the other placement volunteers a fantastic time on their placement.

I've got my visa, a had a whole host of immunisations, packed an assortment of pills (including anti-malarials) , made my arrival arrangements and tried to find as many resources as possible on solar food drying. There's so much more I have to sort before next week, but still cannot wait to start my placement.