Australian solar company lights India's slums with portable lamps

An Australian company lighting India's slums with solar energy is providing a solution to the problem of deadly air pollution in India's poorest areas.

Pollinate Energy, a small company founded by five Australians, is slowing changing the way the people in India's slums light the night.

Its portable solar lamp, with a port to charge a mobile phone, has replaced dirty kerosene lamps in 8,000 homes, according to an Australian Broadcasting Corporation report (ABC) on Tuesday.

Indoor air pollution from kerosene lamps and stoves are the second leading cause of death in the world's second most populous country, making the Australian lamp a potential game changer.

"We used to get oil from the market and pour it into the lamp and light it; the house used to get full of soot and dirt," Abdul, a slum-dweller in Bangalore who lives in a hut made of wooden board and tarpaulin, told the ABC.

"After we got this solar lamp, a lot of things improved," he said. "Now we don't worry that there will be a fire."

Pollinate Energy sells the portable lamps for around 24 U.S. dollars, a significant amount for those earning little more than a couple of dollars a day.

However, with the 1.10 U.S. dollar cost of kerosene each week now sliced down or completely removed and the option to pay in installment, the company said that after 12 months, 98 percent of its customers report the solar light has benefited them financially.

"For most of the people we work with in these urban slums, when we provide a solar light, every time I sell it I think this is the same type of investment as for a plasma screen TV in Australia," Pollinate Energy co-founder Kat Kimmorley told the ABC.

According to Pollinate data, customers report to be 86 U.S. dollars better off a year after purchase. But that is not the most important factor in customers' minds.

The most popular benefits of the new light are improved quality of family and community time followed by allowing children to study with a light.

"What we've found is by providing a light, kids are going to school, mums are working in the evening," Kimmorley said.

"They see opportunity and they have taken the next step to move upwards and onwards."

India's urban population is expected to double in the next 20 years making the Australian-founded company eager to expand.

Pollinate Energy's success in its current Indian bases of Bangalore and Hyderabad in just three years has it preparing to open in five cities by the end of the year and 50 by 2020.

The company received an award in 2013 under the Lighthouse initiative for the United Nations's Momentum for Change program. Endi