It is forenoon on a Sunday and Gul Bibi is making us tea. Adding tea leaves to a streaming electric kettle, she mentions casually that cooking anything once cost her a lot of effort and money. She doesn’t mention the soot-covered walls in her house in the remote valley of Laspur in Chitral and the effects that soot had on her health.

“The five cups of tea I am making now cost us only two rupees,” she points to the pre-paid electric meter installed in a corner of her kitchen, as she switches off the kettle.

Over tea, she tells us about the high cost of cooking rice, mutton, beef, chicken, vegetables and bread (rotis). Like her, an average household in her village Raman would spend thousands of rupees per month on fuelwood. For a family of meagre means, that was a big drain on their hard-earned resources. And that was just the cost of cooking and heating. The family also needed kerosene oil to bring light to dark evenings of the valley.

Until recently, residents in Raman did not have access to power like the other villages scattered across the valley.

All that changed when, in view of the escalating prices of fuel and the cost of living, they decided to do something about it. With help from the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP), the foremost non-governmental development organisation working in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral, the community in Raman built a hydropower station of 500 kilowatt generation capacity.

The locals of a small village in Chitral have raised their standard of living of their area and their hopes for the future since they came together to build and operate a green energy power plant

Standing in her neat and tidy living room with her infant clinging to her, Gul Bibi enthusiastically tells me about the benefits the uninterrupted supply of electricity to her home have provided, which have rendered life quite easy and comfortable for her during the past six years.

“During the winter season, the monthly expenses of electricity is about Rs 2,500 rupees, which cuts to half come summer,” she says. “We used to spend Rs 10,000 per month on fuelwood which is four times greater than that.”

Hewing big logs of wood into small pieces on a daily basis was also a cumbersome job for her in the absence of her husband, who works as a labourer in Karachi in the winter season.

She recalls with weariness how the smoke emitted during the wood-burning process blackened her home and everything else inside it, while it also caused her to suffer from asthma during winter. For her, the electric geyser was a special ‘boon’ of the electricity, providing her hot water during the harsh winter season.

The valley of Laspur flanks the Shandur Pass bordering Upper Chitral district (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) with Ghizar district of Gilgit-Baltistan. The valley is too far from the national grid but has a tremendous hydropower potential.

The community came together to take the initiative and have set an example for others by generating electricity using the water potential of the area. The hydropower project in the village electrifies 1,050 households of the nearby eight villages, including Harchin, Gasht and Balim.

The community also created a distribution company named as the Shandur Utility Company, named after the famous Shandur Pasture. It is entrusted with the management of the hydropower project and its office-holders are changed periodically and democratically. The sustainability factor of the project is its well-established organisation, which makes the savings maintained by the company readily available for repair and maintenance.

The manager of the company, Sharafuddin, says that in case of need, the community will simply draw the required amount from its bank account, even for the purchase of costly items such as generators, turbines or transformers, if they need to be replaced. He adds that the company is run as a social enterprise, with a part of the savings earmarked for development works in the area.

The villagers reiterate that the project has, in fact, changed the quality of life in the catchment area. The cheap power has brought comfort and ease into their lives. The use of electric-powered utensils and home appliances is now common in the valley for cooking and preservation purposes.

In almost every general store in the valley, electrical kitchen appliances are available for sale, which speaks to their usage in the area. A group of tourists from Punjab expressed their amazement at how electric kitchenware had become common in this backward and remote corner of the country.

Rasheed Butt, one of the tourists who had come to Chitral before as well, remarks that they found that the use of wood, natural gas and kerosene oil had been replaced by electricity in the kitchen of a roadside restaurant in the valley.

“For the first time here, I saw an electric frying pan being used to prepare an omelette,” he says.

The village remains in sub-zero degree Celsius temperature during the extended winter season of five months, during which each household used to consume about 4,000 kilogrammes of wood for heating and cooking purposes. The chairman of the Shandur Utility Company, Suharwardi Khan, claims that cheap power had drastically lowered the expenses of heating and cooking by almost 80 percent, as it had nearly eliminated the consumption of wood. As a consequence, the chopping of trees for fuel purposes has been stopped.

“The extra money accrued from the savings of fuelwood in each household is used in raising the life standard and in education,” he says. “The use of green energy in the households has also exterminated the rampant diseases of asthma attacks, lung infections and respiratory problems and pulmonary disorders, which were caused by the smoke emitted by the burning of wood.”

Khan says that the population density of trees and shrubs in the surrounding hills and pastures, as well as on the margins of the villages, has started increasing. This will, in turn, enrich the population of wildlife as well, he hopes.

Green energy is thus leading to a rehabilitation and strengthening of the environment, which will also prevent flash floods and soil erosion, he points out.

The student community, which previously used kerosene lanterns to study at night, is also said to be one of the major beneficiaries of the power project. And the availability of internet facilities is a bonus for it.

Saleh Yaftali, a resident of Harchin village and student of Peshawar University, says that he spends his two-month-long summer vacations in the village now because of the availability of electricity and internet facilities here. He recalls that his two elder brothers hardly spent two weeks of summer vacations in the village while studying at university, because the village was not electrified then.

Community-managed green energy has radically altered not just the standard of living of the residents of Raman and its surrounding villages, but also changed the trajectory of their upcoming generations for the better.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 30th, 2023