Text explains the journey of a tribal village Bancha from Madhya Pradesh from polluted kitchens to clean cooking, eliminating de- forestation, overcoming pollution, promoting sustainability and improving quality of life and overcoming decarbonization with change of traditional cooking to solar based cooking.

1. 8 Unique village—Village Bancha,- Madhya Pradesh --India’s First Village with All-
Solar Kitchens
Housing 69.8% of India’s population in more than 6.4 lakh villages ( Census 2011) ;
around 80 per cent rural families use biomass fuel like wood, crops, manure, and
garbage for cooking purposes. Air pollution caused by the burning of Bio-mass has
been reckoned as the major polluter and killer of the rural women engaged in cooking
food on traditional stoves besides causing large scale deforesting due to large amount
of wood used for cooking in rural India.
Tribal dominated village Bancha, situated in Betul district of the state of Madhya
Pradesh, holds the unique distinction of becoming the first ever village in the country,
where all the 74 households hold the distinction of using solar energy for cooking their
food. This has helped the village women not only to cook their food in the most
hygienic conditions using solar energy, overcoming the numerous health related
problems, hazardous fumes and indoor air pollution caused by traditional stoves and
replacing the use of wood, by cookers using the solar energy. This has helped in not
only saving 1000 kgs of wood used daily. for cooking food by the village but also
saved the womenfolk spending numerous precious hours of life spent on collecting
wood from the nearby forests.

2. Genesis of this transformation started in the year 2016-17, when ONCG, a public sector
Maharatna, organized a Solar Chulha Challenge competition, which was won by students
of IIT Mumbai, by making a stove, and the initiative taken by Mr. Mohan Nagar, the
secretary of the NGO “Bharat-Bharati Education Committee”, working in the village in
the area of education, environment and water conservation in Bancha village, who
approached the IIT Mumbai, for installing solar panels in the village. The task of
installation of solar-powered stoves, plates and batteries was completed in the
December of 2018 with several training sessions conducted for the villagers to create
awareness regarding changing people’s mindset towards the greener and cleaner
transition besides creating skilled manpower to take care of the maintenance required
for the solar panels, stoves. Acceptance of the model came when villagers realized the
benefits of this stove, The model is designed for a family of five with three units of power
generated per day. It will work round the year except during the rain when the presence
of the sun is minimal. It can cook three meals a day and has a power back up of two
hours.
By transforming and adopting solar cookers ,creating smoke-free and pollution-free
environment in the house, with almost zero cutting of trees, Bancha village is of
Madhya Pradesh has emerged as a role model in the domain of safe and sustainable
cooking of food by becoming first smokeless village in India where no house has a stove
nor does anyone need LPG. From using almost 1,000 kg of wood per day to employing
only solar energy for all the cooking needs, the village became the first Indian village
to completely embrace solar-powered stoves. At least 20 kg of wood was required every
day and every morning our first task was to fetch wood from the forest.” In the process,
Bancha village has become completely self-sufficient in terms of electricity except
agriculture and solar panels are not only making it easier for women to cook food, but
also for children to study, generating a new era of pollution free growth and development.
Apart from cooking, people also do not face any problem in running TV, bulb, fan. There
is no maintenance cost and through solar plates, the villagers are also able to get free
electricity. The people here are cultivators and laborers and a lot of time was wasted in
fetching wood from the forest, which is now being used for productive purposes including
agriculture and other agro-related avocation. The cost of a four module placed around
Rs 70,000, was met through the funds provided by the ONGC through CSR, considering
the village being tribal nature of the village
Use of solar cooking system has also eliminated the need of getting government
supported gas connections, and problem caused by non-filling of gas cylinders due to
paucity of money. At the same time, those who were able, had to face a lot of problems
due to the gas running out during the cooking itself. In addition, village has been able to
overcome the problems caused by erratic supply of the electricity. In addition, it has

3. enabled village to be more sustainable for the reason that 45-50 kg of carbon dioxide gas
emitted every month from the use of an LPG cylinder has also been eliminated.
Achieving unique milestone of overcoming the perpetual problem of pollution, poverty,
deforestation was overcome with the active participation of the people of the Bancha
village. That is the reason that even after so many years all the solar systems are running
properly. This success story has also the message that, “Developing technology and
localizing it are two different things. Experiment in Bancha village has achieved success
only because of public participation and their faith in the positivity of technology for
promoting larger public interest. . success achieved by a tribal-dominated village.
However, “These solar cooktops have stopped working for the last two years. The local
technicians here are not able to fix the problems. Cooktops have been sent to
Aurangabad(Maharashtra) for repairing.” Due to this food can no longer be cooked on
cooktop run through solar panels. However, people are still able to light one or two lights
in their homes with it. This calls for relooking at the technologies used at local level, which
invariably should be simple and easy to repair and maintain at local level using local skill
without involving outside agencies requiring major changes.
Note; Above text is based on the input received from; Barua Ananaya; Inspirational
Rural India; 20 Inspiring Villages Giving Life to India’s Vision for a Self-Reliant Future;
January 26, 2022- for Inspirational Villages; Karelia Gopi in article ,MP Gets India’s
First Village with All-Solar Kitchens, June 10,2019; Jain Pallav, Agrawal Shishir Agrawal;
Ground Report; Improper maintenance fails India’s First Solar Village December 3, 2023,
which is thankfully and gratefully acknowledged.