India - E-charkha

BASSI (Jaipur): Mahatma Gandhi's charkha or the spinning wheel not only is an instrument of self-reliance and empowerment in this small hamlet but has literally become a beacon of light in the life of the villagers.

The villagers have devised a novel way of producing electricity while spinning the charkha. The power then is stored in a battery and used later to lit up their homes.

Ever since the Amber charkha was introduced by Ekambernath of Tamil Nadu in 1954 on the call of Gandhiji, it has undergone many transformations and the e-charkha, which has the facility to pro-duce, electricity is the latest in this series.

A specially-designed light emitting diode (LED) and a transistor radio, tailor-made for the charkha, help these villagers keep abreast with news and entertainment as they use the power to lis-ten to the radio.

The Khadi Gramodhyog Saghan Vikas Samiti, Bassi, has intro-duced this multi-purpose Amber charkha as a pilot project of the Khadi Commission for the first time in the country.

The new charkha has a convertor, a storage rechargable battery and LED as attachments. After two hours of running the e-charkha battery stores sufficient power to light a bulb and transistor for 7.5 hours.

Says the secretary of the Khadi Gramodhyog Sanghan Vikas Samiti, Bassi, Laxmi Chand Bhandari, "The e-charkha was introduced as part of a pilot project of the Khadi Commission about six months ago. The new Amber charkha has provisions for affixing up to eight spindles toincrease the output. Besides, a kit is also at-tached to generate elecricity."