India's solar PV manufacturing sector has grown rapidly since the 1990s, usually for export.

However, financing renewable energy in India for residential solar panels has been a lot trickier, mostly because people just can't afford it. There are ways to make it cheaper of course. For example, you could make your own installation. For more details click here.

But there are amny encouraging signs with schemes springing up all over the country.

One such scheme undertaken by the Grameen Surya Bijlee Foundation (GSBF), a Bombay-based nongovernmental organization, is focused on bringing light to rural India by installing LED lamps and solar lights in homes.

Some 100,000 villages in India do not have electricity. The GSBF solar lights are four times more efficient than an a normal bulb. After a $55 installation cost, solar energy lights the lamp free of charge.

Nearly 80 million in India alone light their houses using dirty and dangerous kerosene as the primary lighting media. These solar lights can change all that.

A recent study by the Intermediate Technology Development Group says that indoor air pollution from kerosene lighting results in 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year.

The solar lights are believed to produce nearly 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp and almost 50 times the amount of useful light of a conventional bulb.

The Canadian based Light Up the World Foundation (LUTW) has also used LED technology to bring solar lights to 10,000 homes in remote areas of 27 countries including India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and the Philippines.

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