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Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management, Thursday launched In-Diya, an energy-efficient LED based Lighting System, to provide lighting to people living with no or unreliable electricity in India.

In-Diya is a specially designed LED based lighting system that can operate on main supply and/or solar, and provides backup ranging from 8 - 15 hours for indoor applications, said the company.

Jean-Pascal Tricoire, President & CEO, Schneider Electric, said, "In-Diya earmarks a new phase for our continuing sustainable development programme BipBop. This innovative offer will play a key role in providing access to reliable lighting to 500 million people, thereby enabling them to take part in the inclusive growth story of India."

"In-Diya is an innovation by our engineers with the Indian R&D centre and we intend to take this offer to many parts of the world," he added.

In-Diya LED based Lighting System is available in nine different variants.

The basic model with 45 LEDs is available for Rs 550. It is powered by an external chargeable battery which can be rented from a battery charging station managed by a local entrepreneur.

The high-end variant is a 90 LED Solar Home Lighting System which is compatible with the electrical grid and is priced at Rs. 4500.

Bernard Golstein, Director Marketing & Alliances, Schneider Electric India, said, "In-Diya is the only available LED-based Lighting System which can fully illuminate a typical Indian rural house and provide 8 to 15 hours backup. Our unique R&D and manufacturing capabilities have been utilized to offer a high-quality product at an affordable price".

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The argument for the development of the private health sector in Africa could not have been more strongly made than at a recent international conference held in Accra under the aegis of the World Bank Group. 

Featuring diverse success stories on health care financing and insurance from Ghana, Kenya and Mali, it was perhaps the story of the exploits of the Malian Association of Rural Medical Practitioners that most caught the imagination of participants and positioned an entrepreneurial private sector as possible solutions to access to healthcare. Shortages in the numbers of health professionals have also often been aggravated by inequitable distribution. The underlying reasons were most succinctly made by Dr. Khama Rogo former President of the Kenyan Medical Association and now with the World Bank Group. 

Although acute shortages in health personnel have been observed, it is becoming increasingly indisputable that many African governments are unable or will be unable to adequately fund the huge wage bill that is anticipated should all these qualifying health professionals be employed in the public sector. The phenomenon was cited in Kenya for example where although the State could certainly do with more doctors, securing employment for all qualified doctors was increasingly becoming challenging due to budgetary limitations. As a result, some newly qualified doctors or housemen realizing the housemanship as a part of training have begun offering their services for free in order to be signed off for full certification. Similar scenarios have been reported in Nigeria. 

In Ghana, Ministry of Health estimates put the number of doctors in 2007 at 2, 026 and yet if the West African state were to achieve prevailing doctor: patient ratios of 1: 1000 in some middle income countries by 2025 by which time its population is expected to hit 32 million, it would require not less than 32, 000 doctors. Twice this number of nurses would be required also if the estimates contained in the 2006 UN World Population Prospects are anything to go by. Assuming that governments were able to fund the training of all these doctors, is it safe to also assume the state's ability to employ all these doctors? The clarion call for governments, doctors and other major stakeholders to embrace a new era of entrepreneurial driven health agenda could not therefore have been made more loudly. While this should not be seen purely as a commercialization of the health needs of the people, it should be positioned within a framework that ensures the availability of such health services to the less privileged and underserved areas and this the Malians seem to have done brilliantly.

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MicroVest Capital Management, LLC closed MicroVest II, LP, a private equity fund targeting microfinance institutions worldwide. The fund, which closed with $60 million in commitments, will serve as a capital intermediary between investors and financial institutions that serve the working poor. J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. acted as a placement agent, and one of its affiliates was a lead investor. In addition to J.P. Morgan, lead investors include the International Finance Corporation, CARE USA, Kinnevick New Ventures AB, The Prudential Insurance Company of America, Christian Super Pyt, Ltd, and Mennonite Economic Development Associates.

Press release:
MicroVest Capital Management, LLC is pleased to announce the closing of MicroVest II, LP, a private equity fund targeting top-tier microfinance institutions worldwide. The fund will serve as a capital intermediary between investors and financial institutions that serve the working poor.

The fund closed with $60 million in commitments in December 2009. J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. acted as a placement agent, and one of its affiliates was a lead investor. In addition to J.P. Morgan, lead investors include the International Finance Corporation, CARE USA, Kinnevick New Ventures AB, The Prudential Insurance Company of America, Christian Super Pyt, Ltd, and Mennonite Economic Development Associates.

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BANGALORE: It is not everyday that a young consultant at McKinsey & Co, one of the world's largest management consultancy firms, trades in a 
job at the firm's Seattle office for the rough and tumble of business in rural India. But that is just what John Howard did when he launched Duron Energy, a renewable energy companythat has just started sales of solar-powered plug and play devices for lighting and battery recharges in villages across Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh. 

Elsewhere in rural Bihar, Gyanesh Pandey, chief executive officer and co-founder of Husk Power Systems, and his team of co-founders - that includes Charles Ransler, a class of 2009 alumnus of the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, and Manoj Sinha, also a Darden alumnus, who earlier led microprocessor design teams at Intel - are lighting up over 10,000 homes and small shops across three villages. Husk Power owns and operates miniature power plants generating between 35 kw and 100 kw of electricity from paddy husk that it supplies to consumers in off-grid villages. 

The start-up is expected to raise a fresh round of venture capital this month to scale up operations to more than 60 villages and to set up 50 plants to generate electricity from the current level of 22 plants by May 2010. "We have an open-source model of operations and can very quickly replicate across multiple locations," says Mr Pandey, an electrical engineer from IIT Varanasi, who envisages Husk Power Systems rolling out services akin to a cell phone company. 

India is emerging as a laboratory for innovations in the alternative energy space with entrepreneurs and investors looking to build innovative solutions to address a power-starved economy. This is happening at a time when globally investments in clean tech are losing their luster. Investors are shying away, while entrepreneurs don't seem so gung-ho anymore. 

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A regional front-runner in microfinance legislation, Syria is still struggling to find a sustainable model to finance its rural poor. Currently, NGOs geared toward poverty alleviation dominate Syria's microcredit market, but further expansion of their role is inhibited by outdated government regulation. The entry of more private players is needed to increase market competition and efficiency, which will in turn help the microfinance network to realize its social goals.

While the government has done much to liberalize the financial sector since 2001, Syria remains under-banked and its financial services are limited. Private commercial banks are slowly expanding, having distributed $6.4 billion (LE 34.8 billion) in credit in 2008. However, most of that is oriented towards high-income clients and small and medium enterprises, leaving the many people lower on the economic scale out in the cold.

In particular, those subsisting on agriculture have suffered in recent years due to drought and other climate problems. The UN estimates that 803,000 Syrian farmers have lost their livelihoods since 2006.

Microfinance in Syria came to prominence as the banking sector opened up, in the form of the Fund for Integrated Rural Development of Syria (FIRDOS), an initiative by the first lady Asma Al Assad. The modest success of this lending venture, which operated a multi-million dollar portfolio, and those that followed, enabled Syria to reach an unprecedented milestone: Law No. 15, governing microfinance, was passed in 2007.

"Syria was the first country in the Arab world to issue specific legislation dedicated to the area of microfinance," says Adib Mayaleh, Governor of the Central Bank of Syria. "Yemen has recently approached us for help in this area, which shows that our standards are held in high regard."

Law No. 15 established a licensing process for social financial banking institutions (SFBIs), defined as those that, "help families create opportunities for owning and increasing the accumulation of assets." This does not imply that all SFBIs must be charitable by nature. On the contrary, the legislation specifically paves the way for profit-making businesses to legally disperse microloans. Despite this, Syria's microfinance market has been dominated by non-profit organizations that are not permitted to charge an interest rate of more than 9%.

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Bangalore: Gunjan Kumar's business proposition is simple. The 28-year-old buys traditional art and craft products from artisans in villages and sells these in metro cities.

Kumar started Amethia Apparelz and Co. in Patna 18 months ago with Rs6 lakh. In its first year, the firm earned Rs33 lakh in revenue and expects to end fiscal year 2010 with Rs1.65 crore.

In another part of the country, Nafisa Radiatorwala's start-up, Nature's Glow, is clocking 10 times the revenue it made two years ago. The Vadodara-based firm in Gujarat exports herbal beauty and treatment products to the US, UK, and the United Arab Emirates, and hopes to end 2009-10 with revenue of Rs5 crore.

Kumar and Radiatorwala are among several profit-making entrepreneurs in India's small cities and towns keen to attract venture capital (VC) investment as they look to expand.

Deal contribution from smaller cities and towns increased to about 15% in the previous year from below 5% earlier, according to estimates by four investorsMint spoke with, but not many start-ups from these regions have been able to raise capital from VC funds.

"Investors like glamorous business models," Kumar says in crisp Hindi. "Ours is a very bottom-of-the-pyramid model but a highly profitable business. Our products are sold from four times to 10 times of their production cost."

Traditional crafts made for Rs200 by an artisan in a village in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh could fetch as much as Rs1,500 in Bangalore or New Delhi, he says.

Kumar is looking for VC funding to open 10 ethnic-wear stores across the country in a year—he will open his first store in Patna this week and another in Bangalore in March. He also wants to export Madhubani paintings (traditional paintings from Bihar’s Mithila region) to the US and Europe.

Investors say reaching out to these firms poses several challenges.

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if;">When Sudhir Dixit returned home to head Hewlett-Packard Labs India in 2009, he was given a clear brief: Innovate for the next billion customers. His research is focused on how to meet the needs of non-tech savvy users like shopkeepers - can the keyboard and mouse be done away with, can they use the computer just by touching its screen (like in an ATM), speaking to it, gazing at it or waving their hand? ''The idea is to make it as natural as talking on the phone or watching TV,'' said Dixit.

Dixit is in good company. Multinationals have graduated from captive units that did low-end work to cutting-edge research in India. Companies like Google, Microsoft, GE Healthcare and Siemens have begun to use India to design and develop products, especially for emerging markets like India.

GE thus has developed an electro-cardiogram (ECG) that costs a third of conventional ECG machines. It now sells a baby warmer, used to keep babies warm after birth, at one-tenth of what this machine used to cost earlier. Microsoft, which began with 20 people, today employs 1,500 people at its Indian R&D centre. Work on its key projects, like its search engine Bing and the upcoming Windows 7 operating system, was done in India. India is SAP's largest R&D centre outside Germany and employs 4,200 people. Half of the global development of SAP's customer relationship management software such as CRM 7.0 was done in India.

Bangalore was Google's first R&D centre outside the US. Google Map Maker, a global product which allows users to add or edit features such as roads, businesses, parks, schools, apartment buildings and localities, was developed by its engineers in India. News Archive Search, which helps users search archives for events, people or news, too was developed in India.

It has been a long journey. In the early 1980s, multinationals set up R&D units in India to make use of the low costs and huge talent pool. In 1983, Texas Instruments became the first global company to set up a R&D centre in India. In the last 25 years, the captives have matured, acquired competence to develop products for the global marketplace and are being used for innovation and to access new markets.

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The networking power of Davos writ large: David Din, a Luxembourg-based technology entrepreneur, took his small company global over a simple breakfast at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 28.

Din, one of 26 entrepreneurs named by the Forum as 2010 Technology Pioneers, is behindEpuramat, a company that promises to revolutionize waste water treatment around the world-helping the United Nations meet its goal to give 2 billion additional people access to clean water and sanitary facilities in the coming years.

Epuramat's "Extreme Separator" technology efficiently sucks out solids from wastewater in one treatment step, eliminating the need for membrane or biological filtration. Epuramat plants cost 20% to 50% less than traditional waste treatment plants, are 90% smaller, and use far less energy, helping more water to be cost-effectively recycled for drinking-potentially a big boost for areas lacking clean or plentiful water.

To date, Epuramat, which was founded in 2005, has sold just five of its portable plants-two in California and three in Europe. Winning a place as a 2010 tech pioneer earned Din a golden ticket to Davos, the invitation-only exclusive event where 2,500 of the world's movers and shakers meet once a year, and helped catapult the company onto the world stage.

On Jan. 28, Din, a former analyst at UBS who gave up a comfortable living to bet the farm on a technology he believes in, was invited to a breakfast session with other tech pioneers and a group of social entrepreneurs.

The intersection of social action and technology is a powerful combination. The challenge during the breakfast session (which I moderated) was to find specific ways that the two groups might work together. Din came away a winner: During the two-hour workshop he struck no less than four potential business contacts that could help him branch out into South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Fernando Nilo, founder of Recycla Chile, a recycler of electronic equipment, told Din he is interested in becoming Epuramat's local distributor. David Kuria, from Ecotact, a Kenyan social enterprise specializing in sanitation, says he is interested in exploring ways Epuramat's technology could help solve Kenya's sanitation problems. Ecotact builds "toilet malls" in places where cities cannot keep up with rapid pace of urbanization. Space is at a premium in cities, so Epuramat's small plants are ideal for transforming the sewage from the toilet malls into water that could be used for irrigation or treated further for drinking water.

Helmy Abouleish, founder of Sekem, the first company in Egypt to introduce bio-dynamic farming methods, said he would like to examine ways to use Epuramat's technology to build out efficient, green communities in Egypt.

Iftekhar Enayetullah, head of Waste Concern, a Bangladesh-based company that recycles 40 tons of organic waste daily and turns it into fertilizer, said he will send lab results of waste water generated in its composting plants to Epuramat to explore the possibility of recycling its waste water. If the system proves as efficient as promised, he says he will buy one of the waste water treatment plants from Din.

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In the western Indian state of Maharashtra, in the Mann Desh region, lives 39-year-old Lakshmi Shellar. She spends a typical day in the field tending to her crops; she also rears buffaloes and sells their milk in the village door to door. A widow since the age of 17, Shellar got in touch with Mann Deshi Mahila Bank, a cooperative bank in rural Maharashtra, a few years ago, where she learned the basics about banking products. Now she runs a financial literacy school by night, attended by 20 women from her village.

Women such as Shellar act as business facilitators to India's banks. Some work directly for the bank, others through banking correspondents (BCs) such as microfinance institutions and nongovernment organizations. Each facilitator is connected to hundreds of people. On behalf of the bank, they create awareness about savings and other products, identify potential borrowers, collect and verify loan applications, monitor borrowers' repayment and follow up for recovery.

Shellar's story is told whenever Duvvuri Subbarao, governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), delivers speeches on financial inclusion across the country. Subbarao hopes more women like Shellar will help to promote banking deep within the country. It will be crucial for an organized financial system to find its roots in rural India.

A December 2009 RBI report, "Financial Inclusion: Challenges and Opportunities," points out that the country has 600,000 habitations -- clusters where the population is 100 or more -- but only 30,000 have a commercial bank branch. Less than half the population has a bank account, with the disparity greater in the northeast. Only about 10% of the people have life insurance, and less than 1% have other types of insurance. A full 37% of the population still lives below the poverty line.

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While billions of pounds have been spent on food aid for developing countries, only a small portion has made any long-term difference to the future economic prospects of subsistence farmers in the world's poorest communities.

"Sometimes in Africa you could feel as though you were just pouring money into a bucket with a big hole in the bottom," says Simon Maddrell, who founded the charity Excellent Development in 2002 with Kenyan farmer and engineer Joshua Mukusya.

Schemes such as sand dams, which provide a year-round source of filtered water, and terracing soil to reduce erosion, repay the community's investment of "free" labour by giving a more reliable harvest of valuable food and dramatically reducing the number of hours individuals spend walking miles to collect clean water.He was determined to ensure the new charity would take a longer-term view by only developing projects at the request of the local community, and that these should be built using voluntary local labour.

"Nothing comes for free," says Mr Maddrell, 44. "It is generally true that people don't value what they are given for free as much as what they have worked for. We want communities to engage with and own the process of the project."

As a result of securing community involvement, benefits can be provided at lower cost; typically, every £1 donated by a member of the public achieves £1.44 worth of improvements, fostering "independence and self-reliance", as Mr Maddrell puts it.

"It is challenging the idea that farmers in Africa are idiots who need to be told how to grow food," he says.

The charity is currently helping 67 community groups in Kenya. By way of example, it says a typical one-year project might see a group mobilised to build a sand dam, dig 4,000 metres of terracing and plant 3,800 trees to counteract deforestation caused by population growth.

The community contribution would amount to more than 2,500 days of labour - digging, building and collecting stones, sand and water. Groups must also provide the food eaten by the workers during the one day each week they are expected to contribute.

Based on the minimum wage for an agricultural worker of about £1 per day, and adding the cost of food, the local input would be worth £6,771.

The cost to the charity of providing technical expertise and imported materials such as cement would come to about £15,255, so almost one third of the total £22,026 cost is met by the recipients.

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