Ten years after the light was first thrown on the idea of the bottle bulb, the first batch of these ‘lights’ will be installed in Mumbai’s slums. This week, students from the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, and St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, will come together to plant the first seeds of an international grassroots movement in power-starved India.
In 2002, Alfredo Moser, a mechanic in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where power outages are a regular feature, realised that a plastic bottle full of water, when teemed with sunlight, could light up his dark atelier. For developing and under-developed nations of the world, the discovery of the bottle bulb, also known as the solar water bulb or water bulb, was nothing short of a ‘eureka’ moment.
Without doubt one of the most cost-efficient and green ways to light up a space, the bottle bulb requires a one-litre plastic bottle full of water, bleach to keep the water from growing green and an adhesive of good quality. The bottle full of water should be stuck into the roof in a manner such that the top half of the bottle is exposed to the sun and the bottom half is in the room underneath . When the water in the bottle above catches the sun, it lights up the room underneath like a 55-watt bulb.
Moser’s invention was taken up by his neighbours, but according to Geraldine Ludi of Liter of Light Switzerland, the idea’s breakthrough came about only last year, when Illac Diaz installed the first bottles in the slum of Philippines.
“The Strategy International Management (SIM) students from the University St. Gallen heard about this idea and founded Liter of Light Switzerland (today Liter of Light Europe) in November 2011,” she says. “The idea is to evolve a worldwide movement , spread the word about Liter of Light and illuminate millions of homes.”
A Filipino entrepreneur, the work of Diaz, who spearheaded the campaign, caught the attention of four college students in Mumbai.
“A friend showed me a demonstration video and I, in turn, shared it with three other friends. We were all immediately taken in by it and decided to start work in Mumbai’s slums. Our project is called ‘Jal Jyoti: Lighting lives, One litre at a time‘ . We’re really fortunate that Liter of Light Switzerland announced its decision to visit Mumbai around the same time we started our groundwork,” explains Sanjna Malpani of Jal Jyoti.
Ludi says, “We see ourselves primarily as incubators, hence apart from installing bottles we work towards making the project self-sustaining . We do not want the project to crash when we leave; a local base is really important to establish a grass-roots movement.” – Times of India, 30 Oct. 2012
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