About Sunshine Millennium

 

Sunshine Millennium is a social initiative the the goal of helping rural India's achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by setting up of self-sustaining, off-grid, solar-powered millennium development centres, with rain-water harvesting and bio-composting systems maintained by local stakeholders and funded by corporate social responsibility programmes and government schemes. 

The urban component of the enterprise involves educating the youth (school and college-goers) on sustainable living and development.

What are the millennium development goals (MDGs)? 

Why Solar Energy?

In the past decade renewable energy meant Wind and Biomass generated electricity. With the launch of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) in December 2009 and the revamping of the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) the next decade seems to be poised to be the solar decade and the millennium a solar millennium!

Why Rainwater Harvesting?

  In the quest to eradicate poverty lack of access to clean drinking water and sufficient water for sanitation is a problem, which in turn affects health and health indicators (IMR & MMR: Infant and Maternal Mortality).

Rain Water Harvesting is a great system to tap into the showers that periodically come down by the mercy and sometimes mercilessness of Mother Nature.

 The Need for Bio-composting Systems: 

Waste is a side-effect of life. But wealth from waste is possible. Compost from the composting pit can be used to fertilize organic vegetable and fruit gardens. Bio-gas is a clean fuel that can be used as a clean cooking fuel.

What does SUNSHINE MILLENNIUM aim to do?

SUNSHINE MILLENNIUM aims to establish a "Millennium Development Centre" (MDC) with a Rooftop Solar Generation unit or a solar field (depending on the size of the village) composed of rooftop units over all the village households.

It also seeks to make the villagers complete stakeholders of the MDCs from ground-breaking to growth.

• The Centre will house a primary school that provides meals. This school will double as an adult literacy mission as well. (Target Goals 1 &2)
• It will also provide access to safe drinking water (Target Goals 1, 4, 5, 6, 7)
• It will have a rural health mission with a local trained as a midwife (a trained midwife's presence will immediately curb IMR and MMR [Infant and Maternal Mortality Rates]), a community counsellor, and a vaccination centre and pharmacy. Going forward this mission could provide ready made jobs for graduates of the Rural Medicine programme (Target Goals 4, 5, 6)
• It will also house a telecommunications/DTP centre so that the village is connected to the outside world and has access to open source training and webcasts (Target Goal 8)
• Finally supplementing the school and computer centre there will also be a Green Enterprise Development Centre which will,
• first, train the villagers to service and maintain the solar systems and computers in the village,
• second, get training/support/funding to launch green enterprises (e.g., making them distributors of solar products like solar lanterns, cookers, heaters, pumps; providing green solutions for local enterprises/handicrafts and agriculture productivity enhancement, etc.) and
• third, promote empowerment of women and gender equality and combat the feminization of poverty.
• It will also train villagers to record solar data and access efficiency of the solar system and provide feedback on use of solar technology so that the Local Solar Data and product feedback is made available to interested institutions and the governments (Target Goal 3 & 7)

• The fact that the centre is powered by solar energy and will seek to root out unclean technologies (kerosene lanterns, open fire stoves, diesel pump sets) will achieve Goal 7 automatically.

Rural electrification is directly proportional to improvements in quality of life and abundance.

Target

80,000 off-grid villages (Source: JNNSM)

Special Focus: Villages in "peripheral" (This is an Political Science term) areas such as J&K, Northeast, and India's Red Corridor as the aim is a social revolution that betters and transforms life from the grassroots up which is the heart of India.