Help for 2,412 Power- based Commercial and Micro-entrepreneurs in Rural India by SPI

Smart Power India (SPI)’s Micro-Enterprise Development Program (MED) in India has helped rural communities harness electricity for productive uses, efforting to create socio-economic opportunities for rural and micro-entrepreneurs. Subsequently, it enhanced much more demand for power and, is helping village-level entrepreneurs boost their existing businesses or develop new businesses. The MED programme has helped transform the lives of 2412 commercial and micro-entrepreneurs in rural India micro-entrepreneurs in the states of UP, Bihar, Jharkhand as of April 2021.

In the forementioned regions, SPI, partnering with Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), has assissted accessing to reliable electricity across multiple irrigation units, oil expellers, rice hullers, water treatment units; not only this has resulted in mitigating poverty, but also in bringing socio-economic equality in these communities.

Jaideep Mukherjee, CEO at SPI, while expressing about the MED program, said: “While there has been tremendous progress made in rural electrification with respect to household electrification, challenges remain in even ensuring basic connections to rural businesses and microenterprises. It is with this overarching objective, Smart Power India (SPI) started the MED program with a vision to drive the socio-economic progress of rural customers by ensuring access to reliable and quality electricity. Our partner mini-grid operators/ ESCOs have played a crucial role in this journey. Our efforts together  in understanding the energy needs of customers, offering reliable solutions, ensuring financial viability and building trusted relationships with the customers has resulted in effective implementation of this program within a short span of time.”

The micro-grid sector has proved that reliability is the main point to retain the covered the demand and achieving the full economic potential of energy access in under-served regions. Only through access to reliable power, enterprises are likely to employ relatively expensive and sophisticated appliances for productive purposes. When this happens, there is a triple-win of improved household incomes, increased enterprise productivity, and higher revenue for micro-grid sector.

SPI has developed a set of services to support micro enterprise, that operating based on power and depending on it, to develop at the village level as part of the MED program. It identifies opportunities, technology partners, forges relevant partnerships, and organises training and capacity-building programmes to enable energy access to poor areas and help new businesses take shape, and let the existing microenterprises to expand.