Nearly 100,000 villages in India lack access to electricity, facing shortages and high costs of power consumption.
October 2007: In Saurath, a rural village in Bihar, one of India’s poorest regions, we walk together down a path alongside unending fields of emerald green. We pass a sweet little house with squash growing on its thatched roof and painted sketches of men and women dancing and celebrating drawn across the green exterior walls. A beautiful woman with dark brown skin wearing a fire red sari stands by the house’s column while her young daughter, dressed in forest green with her hair pulled into a neat bun, fans a one-year-old baby.
The woman’s husband, dressed in a fluorescent-orange tank top and shorts, is a loquacious sort with a big smile despite the fact that the village has just suffered the worst floods in decades and he must have lost significant income – with very little to start. This is the plight of farmers who must stare daily at two of Mother Nature’s most unpredictable children: weather and disease. Farmers like this man earn less than a dollar a day – and there are more than a quarter billion like him across India.
The farmer points to the sky, telling us we wouldn’t believe how dark it got in Saurath when day is over. “You can’t see your hand.” For twelve hours a day, he and his family have to sit in darkness, unable to work more, to read, even to see one another except by the light of a small flame. When I’ve spent even just one or two nights in a village without electricity, I have felt oppressed by the darkness after the first romantic half hour of trying to read by candlelight. I cannot imagine this occurring every evening of my life.
Later, we visit one of Madhubani’s most famous artists just as the sun sinks below the horizon and most of the town is plunged into darkness. I understand more fully what the farmer had said about the night here. The billions of lights flickering in the universe feel almost cruelly beautiful in the blackness of the world around us. The artist is lovely and patient with us. She sits on her porch with two candles on either side of her, unrolling picture after picture of Indian gods and goddesses at play and mythical creatures painted with wonderful, whimsical detail.
Our inability to see the pictures is aggravated by an inability to see one another clearly. It is as if are all trying to reach out of narrow tunnels with little success, though with good humor we manage to select a few paintings each – especially given the artist’s price - $10 for the larger paintings which took her 4-5 days to create and $5 for smaller ones. Apparently, other artists in town hear about the bonanza sale and begin to crowd around, wanting to show their own work. The woman artist graciously opens a man’s roll of paintings and we agreed to buy one of his as well – only he asks for $20 for a larger one when we ask the price. Though we purchased more than twice as many pictures from the woman artist, her joy at the sale is greatly diminished when the man gets the price he requests – and at the same time, especially given the darkness, it feels too awkward to everyone to negotiate.
Happiness is a function of comparison. Regardless of whether you are rich or poor, how you feel about how you are doing depends in large part on how your neighbor is doing. This phenomenon, taken to a global level, means that as low-income people become increasingly aware of how far behind they are economically, the more unhappy they will feel. And ironically, for the very rich, the incremental happiness they gain from additional money will diminish, for there will always be people richer around them. So it only makes sense from the perspective of maximizing our collective happiness on earth that the rich give more of their money and of themselves to find lives of greater meaning and to bring the poor more opportunities to change their own lives by generating wealth and a greater sense of purpose for themselves as well.
At the same time, the woman patiently works with us to sell her paintings, and soon the rest of the villagers hear that there are foreigners looking to buy. Within twenty minutes three or four other artists come to see us and I would love to peruse their crafts; but it is so dark we can see little anyway, and the stress of knowing we have a long drive in that darkness ahead on crumbling roads shared with trucks with broken headlights forces us, finally, to go.
Again if there is a single important lesson from the day it is how critical it is to listen. The farmer spoke about the power and powerlessness of night in his village. It resonated more intensely when we who were lucky to have candles and a flashlight stumbled around, trying to complete a single, simple transaction. We didn’t have homework to do, didn’t have books to read, and we were there for less than an hour, yet still we felt the stress of not being able to see. And the clock hadn’t even reached 7 pm. Acumen Fund is investing in a low-cost LED light company to try and sell small, affordable units to light up people’s homes in ways that could fundamentally alter their lives. Each of these investments is a small step, and how to scale them is our greatest challenge.