Biofuels to expand mobile coverage in rural India

Last year, a coalition of mobile phone access providers and industry leaders announced they were going to use biofuels to power base stations in the rural areas of developing countries (earlier post). A pilot project in Nigeria, relying on groundnuts for power, is now taken to the world's second most populated country, India.

Indian mobile operator Idea Cellular, Ericsson and the GSM Association's Development Fund have teamed up to use biofuels as a source of power for wireless networks in rural India. In a pilot project in Pune, Maharashtra, the three organizations will begin using biofuels to power mobile base stations located beyond the reach of the
electricity grid.

The first phase of the project, which is testing the feasibility of non-edible plant-based fuels, such as cotton and jatropha, is nearing completion. The second phase of the project will entail setting up a supply chain using locally grown crops to produce biodiesel to power between five and 10 base stations in the Maharashtra region. The goal is to have these base stations powered by cotton or jatropha by mid-2007.

One third of Indian homes are not connected to the power grid, but demand for mobile phones is growing rapidly. As our allies at Worldchanging have often shown, in the hands of the poor and of small farmers, cell phones can have very transformative effects (and here, here and here).

A pilot scheme in west India has been set up by mobile firms and industry body the GSMA development fund. "It is about connecting the unconnected," says Dawn Hartley, development fund manager at the GSMA.

Rural connection
Mobile phone use has exploded across India. In 2003 there were just 13 million mobile phone subscribers. Today, there are nearly 130 million. Much of this take-up has been in urban areas where there is a comprehensive mobile network.

But outside the major towns, where approximately three-quarters of India's 1.2 billion people live, mobile coverage is fragmented. This is in-part because the electricity network, used to power the mobile network infrastructure, is often unreliable and does not cover the whole of the country.

"As GSM operators expand their network coverage into new areas, one of the biggest challenges is to overcome operational issues associated with the lack of basic infrastructure," said Mats Granryd, managing director, Ericsson India.

Remote base stations, which transmit and receive information from handsets, are already powered by conventional fuel generators. But these can be dirty and require a lot of maintenance. They can also be expensive to run requiring weekly deliveries of fuel. Ericsson estimates that half of the cost of a remote base station goes on fuel:
biodiesel :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: jatropha :: cotton :: groundnuts :: wireless :: mobile phones :: rural development :: India ::

Clean running
The pilot scheme, put forward by the GSMA and mobile firms Idea Cellular and Ericsson, hopes to overcome some of these problems by using mobile base stations that use generators running on biodiesel.

The fuel is created by combining plant oils with alcohol, in the presence of a catalyst to speed up the process.

The scheme in India will use oil derived from plants such as cotton, a mahogany-like tree called neem and jatropha.

Jatropha trees are already widely grown across India, specifically as a biofuel crop. The seeds of the plant are a traditional remedy for constipation.

Biodiesel has a lower environmental impact than conventional fuels and crucially, can be grown and processed locally.

Although at pilot stage, the scheme hopes to have up to 10 base stations operating in Pune, in the Maharashtra region of west India, by mid-2007.

The projects build on other GSMA projects operating in Lagos, Nigeria, where the biofuel is derived from groundnuts.

Photo: courtesy of Ericsson - Biofuels to Expand Mobile Coverage, photo series.

More information:
BBCNews: Mobiles switch on with biofuels - Feb. 8, 2006
Kauppalehti (Finland): ERICSSON: Biofuels to be used to extend mobile coverage in rural India - Feb. 8, 2006