Yein Udaan is a young Chennai based organisation that works towards developing safe spaces for community members and helps empowering them using different educational tools. During the lockdown period, many of our community members faced acute shortages of electricity as most of them could not afford to pay the bills. It was a constant struggle they had to battle with the harsh Chennai weather during the peak summers. Children especially bear the brunt as they dont have access to basic electricity to study and scramble to make ends meet. Many households even resort to kerosene to generate light, which leads to increased exposure to carbon emissions.

This however is the story of most low income households across India irrespective of the pandemic. Many households still face shortage of power.

Solar energy, a resource that is available in abundance in India is often wasted and left underutilised. Our collaboration with Greenlight Planet will help us in changing this story. We want to make electricity accessible to low income households using solar energy as the only input and fully utilising the resource that is freely available.

Greenlight Planet, is the largest off-grid solar company in the world, which designs and distributes a line of affordable and high-quality solar home energy solutions for households that are completely off-grid or lack reliable access to the grid.

Benefits of Off Grid Solar:

A) Access to better lighting: 88% of people feel that the quality of life has improved
B) No Power Outages
C) Energy access is contributing to income generation: Nearly one-fifth of customers are using their energy products or service for Income generating activities
D) Health and well-being improved: Customers using modern lightning switches from Kerosene enhanced their health and reduced C02 and black carbon emissions.

Our goal is to run a pilot to test the solar lamps with 20 families in the Dhobikhana community in Chetpet for a period of one month. And if the pilot is successful then we will roll out the plan to the 250 families living in the same community and further expand to other solar powered products like fans and higher powered lights.

The name of the product is Sun King Pico Plus and its features are:

1.5x brighter than a candle
2.5 year battery life
3.72 hours of low light mode

With your help and support we wish to bring light to the lives of thousands of families.