As dusk settles over Sulma and Hosir, two remote tribal villages tucked inside the Lawalong Wildlife Sanctuary in Chatra district, a faint hum of electricity cuts through the evening stillness. “Earlier, we wouldn’t step out after sunset — snakes, wild boars, kept us indoors. Now this solar streetlight gives us courage,” says Mamta Devi, a member of the Ganju Adivasi community, adjusting the end of her faded red sari as she walks towards a hand pump glowing under the new LED fixture.
Her words capture the quiet revolution underway in one of Jharkhand’s most difficult terrains — where wildlife, insurgency and poverty intersect.
Until recently, these villages — marked ‘inaccessible’ on official maps — lived by the rhythm of the sun. Electricity was a distant concept, as luxury as an alien as a railway station. The Ganju tribe, considered one of the most marginalised in Jharkhand, relied on kerosene lamps, spending up to ₹180 a month on fuel, inhaling thick smoke through long evenings that forced children to abandon studies by 4 pm. “We used to cook dinner before the sun went down. If someone fell sick at night, we waited till dawn. Mobile phones were useless — you had to walk 4 km and pay `10 to charge once,” recalls Sevak Ganju from Atavahi tola in Sulma village. His son, Vikas Kumar, has just taken admission in BA Philosophy — making him the first ever college-going youth from his hamlet. “After electricity came, children started watching educational videos. I want more graduates in our tola,” Vikas says, his tone carrying both pride and an urgency rarely heard in these forests.
Lawalong Wildlife Sanctuary, spread over dense sal forests, is known more for its elephants, leopards, and Maoist hideouts than for its development infrastructure. The grid extension here was considered economically unviable and logistically dangerous. But under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY) and Jharkhand’s Rural Solar Electrification Scheme, implemented by the Jharkhand Renewable Energy Development Agency (JREDA), microgrids have begun piercing through the isolation.
According to official data, Jharkhand has installed solar micro and mini-grids in 548 villages, reaching 29,450 households with a total deployed capacity of over 10 MW. Chatra alone accounts for nearly 39 per cent of this rural electrification footprint, emerging as the state’s nerve centre of decentralised renewable power. These micro-grids with a minimum 10 kWp provide 8 hours of backup to each home along with three LED lights, a charging socket and solar streetlights — a minimal package that has had a disproportionate impact. In Hosir village, a 60 kW microgrid, installed last year, changed something more symbolic than power consumption — it lit up a school.
“I have been teaching here since 2003. For nearly 15 years, I was the only teacher handling all eight classes. There was no light, no fan — just heat, dust and dropouts,” says Jogeshwar Yadav, a middle school teacher. “After solar power came, attendance improved. Even the girls come regularly. We are now approved for smart classroom installation.”
This reporter visited the school and spotted a group of tribal girl students — Rabitha Kumari (Class 8) and Suganthi Kumari (Class 7) — eagerly discussing their aspirations. “I want to get educated and work, but earlier I couldn’t study after dark. Now I do homework at night while my mother cooks under the new bulb,” Rabitha smiles, her face half illuminated by the classroom’s lone LED tube. In the nearby Herum village, Gulab Kumar Bansal, a young graduate and one of the very few educated members of the Ganju community, has now become a local energy guardian. “I maintain 35 micro-grid installations. When something fails, people call me, not the government,” he says, checking the inverter readings. “Electricity has opened new livelihood options. Some families run small flour mills now. Women can stitch at night. But there are challenges too — my own village has two 50 kW grids installed in 2016. Backup has dropped to just two hours due to rising consumption. We need scaling up.”
“Under the JREDA solar micro-grid model, we give each household three LED light points, a mobile charging socket and connect one solar streetlight for every five homes with at least eight hours of backup. But hardware alone doesn’t sustain a project. So, in every village we form an ‘Urja Samiti’—a small energy committee — to collect nominal maintenance fees, report faults and identify one or two young people who we train as barefoot technicians. Once people start owning the system, even the smallest hamlet begins to treat electricity like a public asset, not a government handout,” says Mukesh Prasad, electrical executive engineer, JREDA.
Not just Chatra, other districts like Gumla, Sahibganj, Garhwa, Godda, Latehar and Hazaribagh that are home to a sizeable tribal population are experiencing this silent revolution. Across the river belt in Sahibganj, the impact of power is measured through women’s lungs and shop shutters, not just wattage. In Dulmi village, Marangmai Marandi said, “I cooked under diesel smoke for years. My chest burned every night. With the bulb on, I finish work faster and my children sit with their notebooks. Even my breathing feels different.” Another resident, Bitea Marandi, who runs a small grocery shop, put it bluntly: “Earlier, I closed my shop when the sun went. Now I keep it open till 9 pm. Electricity has made me earn like the men.” Her shop, no bigger than a tea stall, glows like a beacon on the Ganga riverbank settlement that had never seen a lit storefront in the evening before the micro-grid arrived.
While solar energy has brought light, it has also attracted threat. “In interior forest belts—and even in areas with security challenges like Buddha Pahad in Latehar—the real test is whether the village takes charge after installation,” said a local contractor, who doesn't want to be named. TNIE spoke to JREDA and field workers who recalled how equipment had to be moved on donkey backs and carried manually through forested zones to set up micro-grids in remote pockets.
Buddha Pahad—a 55 sq km Maoist-infested zone on the Jharkhand-Bihar border—was a last bastion of Maoists before security forces broke their stronghold. “Once the CISF camp and villages got power through micro-grids, things changed. When light reaches a village, the fear also begins to recede. It creates a psychological shift,” the contractor said. JREDA Director KK Verma said work is not done yet. There are several villages and tolas that do not have electricity yet. "Through district administrations and local sources, we keep identifying such hamlets and villages and try to install solar off-grid plants. We recently received requests for installation in 40-50 new villages."
The deployment has not been limited to hardware. SwitchON Foundation, working alongside JREDA, focuses on community training and skill-building. “Technology can power houses, but only community ownership keeps it running,” Deepak Kumar Arya, senior project coordinator at SwitchON said. “For instance, in Latehar, 100% grids are functional because village committees manage them like a public asset.” SwitchOn has prepared a Solar Mini Grid Impact Assessment Report commissioned by JREDA. The report shows that between 2016 and 2021, districts with micro-grid penetration saw a 53% rise in household electrification in Chatra.
— This story was produced with the support of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network
