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 company that has just started sales of solar-powered plug and play devices for lighting and battery recharges in villages across Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh.

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A startup based in Bangalore, India, is selling an off-the-shelf device for less than the cost of a one-night stay in an average hotel in downtown San Francisco that can offer rural Indians a way to generate and store solar power, charge cell phones and other appliances, and run a set of LED lights.

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Our new website is www.duronenergy.com

One of the major problems prevailing is lack of electricity due to which
children are unable to study after sunset, leading to school dropouts.
There are also other instances such as deaths due to poisonous
insects/reptiles bites after dark.

World Vision in partnership with Duron has proposed to provide solar
lights to these villages. The successful implementation of the program
will mean less school dropouts. Vulnerable villagers will also be
protected from poisonous bites by reptiles/insects.  YOU can mean a
whole new world for these underprivileged children.

To donate now, please visit:  http://www.worldvision.in/?duron

Learn more about this incredible organization here:  http://www.worldvision.in/

Bangalore: Duron Energy, a major player in affordable energy generation products, is targeting rural markets in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh with off-the-shelf solar home systems.

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Lucknow:  The abysmal power situation in Uttar Pradesh may be causing heartburn among senior government officials, who are hard pressed to bridge the demand-supply gap, but for John Howard and Amit Shah, co-founders of Bangalore-based Duron Energy, it provides the biggest opportunity to promote solar energy.

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As I considered our work over the past 14 (or so) months, a few choice moments punctuate my experience.  I wanted to share with you my three favorite moments at DWPower to date.

Moment 1: We might be on to something…

For the month of November in 2008, Hasit and I lived in Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh and worked in the surrounding villages.  The entire team had spent the prior few months developing prototypes for the Indian market.  Hasit and I were testing these prototypes with potential customers in the villages around Hardoi.  After an initial interview, we would leave a prototype with a test participant for a week, visiting often to garner feedback and provide support.

One particular test participant was a middle-aged lady with a mentally handicapped husband.  She supported her family by working at the local NGO and tending to her two acres of farmland.  In addition to her husband, she lived with two daughters—about 17 and 12.  She forced her daughters to attend school (against the norms for the village) and encouraged them to study in the evenings.  Unfortunately, her daughters always complained of the light provided by the kerosene—it was too dim to study in and the smoke caused their eyes to burn.

As we visited the household throughout the week that our product was there, we could see them getting used to the light in the house.  On our last day working with that house, as we prepared to collect the product, the woman and her daughters invited us to sit with them for a cup of tea.  As we drank tea and socialized, they began telling us of all the benefits of the product that we had left with them.  The daughters enjoyed studying, the mother was able to cook in light and the whole village used the lit front porch to socialize.  The mother told us of the impact the prototype had on their life in just one week, and that she believed this product would make a huge difference to people in India.

This feedback energized me.  For the first time since I had joined DWP, I had a strong sense that we were on to something…

Moment 2: Making DURONs…

I moved to India to ramp up our office and manufacturing capacity at the end of January in 2009.  Over the next few months the team and I worked with suppliers to develop our supply chain and manufacturing process.  We spent days with different suppliers– perfecting designs, negotiating costs, setting up production processes, etc.

One of the suppliers that we worked most with was our plastic mold maker.  James had designed a beautiful casing for the DURON and we had contracted a local Gujarati mold maker to produce the die tool.  We had pushed him to meet our timeline as the die-making was the longest lead time item.  His office and factory were in the industrial part of Ahmedabad—way off the beaten path that we usually took.  Hasit and I would visit him regularly to ensure that progress was on track.

James actually landed in India the morning that we were supposed to get our first plastic pieces out of the die.  We picked him up from the airport and went straight to the die maker’s facility.  We watched them complete the final polishing (after pulling two all-nighters to complete the die on time) and mount the die.  We watched in awe as the first pieces of plastic came out of the die.  They were misformed (because the die  was not  warm yet) and the color was off (we would later standardize our DURON blue)… but the plastic was forming.  The DURON had turned from napkin sketches, to computer drawings, to hardened steel dies and finally to the physical plastic housing we saw in front of us—we could not have been more thrilled.

These plastic pieces were the last of the material required to build our first batch.  To date, we had made a few test units to confirm the design, but these would be the first units to be produced on the manufacturing line.

I watched the DURON’s get packed and remembered the reaction that our test participant had in Hardoi.  I imagined how people would feel when they brought this box home and opened up their new home energy system.

Later that day, I remember looking at the first 35 packed boxes and preparing them to be shipped out.  It was a memorable moment—seeing the past few months of effort in the form of a product.

Moment 3: Tomorrow!

My third favorite moment is actually right now.  One of the best parts of being a social entrepreneur is that we are always thinking about tomorrow.  The progress of our business is based very much on the decisions we make today and how we implement them in the future.  As a young company, our memory is short and we are able to learn and adapt from yesterday very quickly.

We are careful to learn from the past, but we certainly do not get bogged down by it.  I am learning that an important part of social entrepreneurship is optimism.  We just don’t have time or energy to be pessimistic—it is better to use our effort on finding solutions.

I am currently on a plane back to Ahmedabad and am excited about what tomorrow is going to bring.  There will inevitably be more challenges that we will have to push through, but the opportunity to provide energy to the rural markets motivates me.  I just can’t wait to “make things happen!”

Back then, in the immaculate, air-conditioned office, the hard part was making the case that I needed an expensive piece of equipment, and that the increased quality of my work was worth the investment.  Here at DWPower, I’d asked for an oscilloscope and my boss, an engineer himself, said “sure!  If you need one, go get one!”

That was the easy part.

The hard part was coming up.

You see, Ahmedabad, India, where I work, is not an oscilloscope-friendly kind of town.  When you go into downtown, you’re likely to see lively street vendors, elephants trundling through the streets, restaurants and beggars and motorcycles and juice stalls.  Oscilloscope stores, not so much.  I realized that without ubiquitous Radio Shacks, web commerce and next-day fedex delivery, I fall into a kind of paralysis, unable to take a high-level vision, wave my fingers and make things happen.  Not speaking the Ahmedabadi language and unused to the city, finding an oscilloscope store, or even a grocery store, for that matter, seems as intimidating a task as flying to the moon.  But there’s a well known fact in India–anything you want–anything at all, you can find in the dusty back streets of the cities.  My co-worker Preetam, who’d spent much of his childhood in Ahmedabad, volunteered to show me this Indian magic trick.
“We’re getting close,” Preetham said from the front of the scooter.  I look around, but can’t make out anything in the crush of the crowd that would conceivably sell electronic measurement equipment.  We park the bike, which is just as well, since we’d been traveling at walking speed, and start looking around.  Preetam asks people in Gujarati where we can get electronic meters, and a variety of responses flood in.  Everybody offers advice–someone tells us to go just down the block, someone else tells us to go to the next town over, 40km away, and a third man sadly shakes his head, saying that there are no oscilloscopes in Ahmedabad.  As we walk through the streets, I get a lot of stares.  There’s maybe 200 foreigners in Ahmedabad, a city of 4.5 million, and it’s pretty rare to see a firingi, a foreigner like myself.  Men take my hand as we walk, saying “Which country?  What is your name?”  I have fleeting conversations with the men before running to keep up with Preetam, who strides through the crowd undeterred.  We eventually make our way to a tiny doorway crammed in between two ceiling fan shops.  The sign on the door reads “Meter World”.

Pushing our way through a narrow hallway crammed with people, we make our way to the desk.  Preetam starts speaking in rapid Gujarati, and while my eyes adjust to the dim interior, I look around in wonder.  The small shop is filled, floor to ceiling, with piles of multimeters, oscilloscopes, light meters and every other piece of measurement equipment you can see.  Huge, Dr. Seuss-like piles of boxes stretch up to the ceiling, towering over us in an intimidating, impossible way.  This entire store, I think, could come crashing down at any moment.  I could be buried here in a tomb of oscilloscopes.
Someone plunks a hefty catalog in front of me and tells me in broken English to pick out an oscilloscope I like.  I thumb through it.  There’s one oscilloscope in the catalog.  “I’ll take that one!” I say.

The store owner dispatches someone to go get the oscilloscope from their warehouse and I run to an ATM to withdraw the ~$300 US to pay for it.  The money in Indian rupees is a thick sheaf of bills about as large as my calf.  I struggle for a while to shove them into my wallet, then give up and cram them into my back pocket,  my pants jutting out awkwardly around the wad of money.  Preetam and I walk back to the store, sit on a couch underneath a groaning shelf of multimeters, and we wait.
and we wait.

And wait, in the heat and the dust.  The fans overhead creak and strain but produce no real wind.  The noise from the street and the arguments in the crowded shop are deafening.  While we stand there, crowds come in and out of the shop.  Everyone in Ahmedabad, it seems, wants a multimeter.  Over all of this, stockboys pass heavy boxes back and forth over our heads.

Two hours later, the runner comes back through the door with a large box.  He opens it and pulls out an oscilloscope completely different from the one in the catalog.  Actually, it’s a very bad one, without the features we need.  “This is no good!” we protest, “We want the one we picked.”  The shop owner scrutinized us, scowling beneath his mustache.  “That one is not available here.”

The obvious question hung in the air over us.  “Why did you make us wait two hours?” I wanted to scream, but I already knew the answer.  We waited two hours because we’re in Ahmedabad.  It’s as simple as that.  Are you going to sulk over it, are do you want an oscilloscope?

Preetham and the store owner launch into another animated Gujarati conversation.  After a few minutes of standing there helplessly, Preetham turns to me and says, “the oscilloscope you want is on the other side of town.  We can wait here…” (No!  I scream inwardly) “… or you can go over there and pick it up”

I say I’ll pick it up, and the shop owner scribbles and address for a shopping center on the other side of town. Preetham says he has to go do work, so I’m left on my own.  I hail a rickshaw and show the driver the address, and we lurch our way there, chasing the mythical oscilloscope across the city. The driver drops me in the middle of nowhere, in an abandoned concrete square somewhere I’ve never seen before.  There’s nothing that looks like a shopping center, but he insists that this is the right place before shooting away.  I walk around, looking for a passerby, find an old woman crouched in the shade, and ask her in my simple Gujarati where the shopping center is.  She points with her stick to a small muddy alley.  “That’s the shopping center?” I ask.
“Yes, yes.  Just through that alley”

I walk into the alley, sloshing through the mud and puddles and cow dung.  “Where the heck,” I think, “am I going to find an oscilloscope in the middle of this?”
As if to answer me, a growl of noise and a shower of sparks flies out of an open doorway, hitting me in the chest.  I jerk back–someone’s cutting steel with a grinder.  I peer inside the doorway, looking at nine men standing around in the heat of a large machine shop.  The name on the shop matched the name on my piece of paper, so I step inside, skirting the stream of sparks.  There’s what looks like an office above me, with a steep ladder leading up to it.  I climb up and say to the couple men sitting there, “I want to buy an oscilloscope”

“Of course!” one man says, as if this happens all the time.  “Sit down, sit down!  I am Sandip!  Which oscilloscope you want?”
I show him the page from the catalog, and he leaps up and runs into a backroom, shuffling through boxes and papers.  A few minutes later, he emerges with the exact oscilloscope I wanted.  We plug it in and test it, with several of the machinists climbing up and clustering around in curiosity to see what a gora could be doing with a piece of equipment up here.

The oscilloscope seems perfect, so I hand him the wad of cash, which he counts with great solemnity, and he then calls to the machinists, who swarm around the oscilloscope, packing it carefully and putting it back in its box, taping it over and over again until the cardboard is completely eclipsed in a mountain of tape.  They hand me the box and I make my uneasy way down the ladder, through the muddy street and hail a rickshaw to take me and my oscilloscope back to the office.

Just another day in the employ of DWPower.