Abstract
The women wielding soldering irons in this rustic solar engineering workshop may not know how to read or write, but they know their way around their circuit boards. “This is the shunt coil,” Jansya Devi says, with a proud smile. “This is an eight-pin connector, and this is a drum coil.” These technical words were not in Devi’s vocabulary a few months ago. She hails from Bihar, a state in eastern India known mainly for its rural poverty. Her village doesn’t get electricity from the national power grid, she says, and after dark she typically does her housework by the light of a kerosene lantern and candles. She dreads the monsoon season, when high winds make it difficult to keep the wicks lit. She has a mobile phone, but to charge it she has to send it along with someone making a trip to the nearest town.
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