(Top) Karanj trees at Gardih and the generator at Ganjhu’s house. Pictures by Pankaj Singh

Gardih (Bokaro), Feb. 26: Two teenagers, both first-year BA students at Tenughat College and Jharkhand College, Dumri, respectively, have done the impossible. Basudev and Narayan Ganjhu have lit up their remote hamlet with electricity.

The experiment to generate electricity with oilseeds (Karanj ka tel, as it is called here) was hugely successful, with some help from Jharkhand Renewable Energy Development Agency (JREDA). Barely 2 litres of the oil light up 100 homes as well as 20 bulbs put on lamp-posts outside for three hours every evening, between 6 and 9 pm.

“We were tired of the dark ages,” confesses Basudev. By the time he returned from college, there would be household work to do. And with sunset, the village would go to sleep. Basudev and Narayan moved from one government office to another till they were able to contact JREDA and persuaded the officials to launch the experiment in their village.

Inhabited by Ganjhus, the village is said to be a hotbed of extremists. This reporter was advised by the police to hurry and return early from the village since it was already noon. The underground Maoists draw heavily from the Ganjhus, who are poor but hard-working nevertheless. It was not easy, therefore, for the teenagers to get officials to take them seriously. But they speak reverentially of one “Shivanand Babu” from JREDA, who went out of his way to help.

The experiment has caused even the mandarins in New Delhi to sit up and take notice. Karanj is a wild and largely neglected tree that grows unplanned but in abundance in several forested areas, including Jharkhand. The ease with which the oil has substituted diesel or petrol at Gardih, has opened up possibilities of electrifying villages at the fraction of the cost required to extend transmission lines across remote and far-flung areas.

The generator at Gardih has a capacity to produce 5KVA. Twenty lampposts have been erected across the village in such a way that wires could be extended to each of the 100-odd huts and small houses. The generator has been placed in the house of S. Ganjhu, primarily because it enjoys a central position.

A toothless Jibu Ganjhu (70) had never imagined that he would find electricity in the village during his lifetime. With child-like enthusiasm, he exclaims “Genrattor kerosene, petrol se na chalai, Karanj tel se chala hai,” (The generator does not run on petrol or kerosene but on Karanj oil). He remembers the date, October 21 last year, when the entire village dressed up to greet light in their lives.

Although the area has hundreds of trees bearing Karanj seeds, the two young men realise that they are not enough. Karanj trees will have to be grown in thousands to feed the demand, and planted systematically. On Sunday the oil stock was enough to last them for the next 10 days. But the youths are not ready to return to the Dark Age and have decided to buy the oil to keep up the supply. Each household has been asked to shell out Rs 20 every month, so that they can light up the village, even if for three hours.

“We do not want government jobs. We want to remain in the village and help out our elders,” said Basudev and Narayan. Both of them dream of a chain of energy cooperatives that will transform the region.