SIBM students create light source using PET bottle that works on solar energy and can be used even at night

Using a PET bottle, a solar panel and a switch, students of the Social Entrepreneurship and Consulting Cell (SECC) from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM) have innovatively lit up homes of almost 75 villagers in Nande village. Now, they will do the same for others in Lavale, Chande and Mulkhed.

The bottle-light, which the 12 students created under their social innovation project, costs Rs 450. It absorbs solar energy during the day while simultaneously acting as a source of light, so it can light up villagers’ homes at night too. The SECC has already installed 75 units of the bottle-light at Nande as part of the project. They have also christened their innovation Ashadeep that means ‘light of hope’.

Speaking about what sparked off the movement, Kailashyar Udaykumar, a second-year MBA student, said, “We were helping Aadarsh, a Self Help Group (SHG) in Nande village, to launch ‘Aadarsha Mirchi Powder’ and that was when we realised that the villages needed light powered by solar energy. We happened to see a video of a solar light bulb created using PET bottles in the Philippines and started thinking about how we could implement the project here.”

Explaining the way the device functions, the students said that the bottle-light unit has three main parts — any beverage pet bottle, a solar panel and switch. The pet bottle is filled with distilled water and a chemical. A light bulb is positioned in the top half of the bottle.

During the day, solar light is absorbed and stored in a small battery. Also, the sunlight that shines through the water acts as a source of light. When the switch is turned on at night or during a power cut, the stored energy in the battery is then supplied to the bottle.

Most of the students of the group with an engineering background started experimenting on the bottle-light in August last year and finished it in December. As a pilot project, they installed eight such lights in Nande village. With feedback they received from the villagers about these models, they made improvements and came up with Ashadeep.

Speaking about other similar projects, students said that many other institutes were experimenting with the bottle-light. However, most of these projects only worked on giving light in the day. Here, the students added a battery to store solar energy and an LED light to make the light work at night too.

Dr Vivek Sane, director of SIBM and Vinod Shastri, faculty of SECC, said that the device has a system wherein it lights up a room during the day, only by dispersing the light through the liquid solution in the plastic bottle, while the solar panel on the roof charges the battery. When the sun goes down, the charged battery lights up the LED in the bottle. This is a device one could keep handy during a power outage as well.

The students said that Ashadeep is simple to construct, as all the elements used to make it are easily available near rural areas and it is useful during power cuts as well. Team member Aditya Khanzode said that the SECC had donated some funds for the project and they will soon teach SHGs in these villages to make the bottle-lights.

Another student Vaishnavi Nayel informed us that the students were also doing some experiments to bring the price of the bottle-light down to Rs 415.

Vidya Yervadekar, director of the Symbiosis University, said, “President Pratibha Patil appealed to our students to use solar energy for social change when she addressed the convocation ceremony in December last year. The students have done a wonderful job, keeping her words in mind.”

Kailashyar Udaykumar, Aditya Khanzode, Vaishnavi Nayel, Chinmay Bhogle, Siddharth Talawadekar, Shivtej Shinde, Aditya Jain, Shankar Seetharaman, Jyoti Rajguru, Pranay Gupta, Soumyayan Roy and Vikram Nagalgaonkar form the team of the Ashadeep project.