Webinar: Opportunities and Challenges for Rural Off-Grid Lighting and Distribution Markets in India

Webinar: Opportunities and Challenges for Rural Off-Grid Lighting and Distribution Markets in India

5 March 2014

9:00 a.m. EST | 3:00 p.m. CET

 

The United Nations Foundation's Energy Access Practitioner Network, in partnership with the Clean Energy Solutions Center, is hosting a no-cost, webinar-based training about the challenges and opportunities within India's rural off-grid lighting and distribution markets. Panelists will discuss energy access initiatives being undertaken in India by the UN Foundation as part of the UN and World Bank's Sustainable Energy for All initiative.

Anjali Garg and Praveen Kumar will provide an overview of the IFC's Lighting Asia/India program and discuss the work being undertaken to effectively address the energy needs of communities in remote rural areas, while promoting local entrepreneurship and sustainable rural development.

Ajaita Shah from Frontier Markets will share her experience working with remote rural communities in Rajasthan, India, to provide access to affordable and quality solar solutions to low-income households.

Gaurav Gupta from Dalberg will talk about emerging and innovative distribution models in off-grid renewable energy sectors in India.

The presentations will be followed by an interactive Q&A session that will allow participants to discuss best practices in the lighting and distribution markets in India and whether this work can be scaled and applied to other markets.

To register, please visit https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/313205262.

Author bios can be found at https://cleanenergysolutions.org/training/rural-off-grid-lighting-distribution-markets-india.

 

Are They Mad? Village Destruction? US Guilty of War Crimes

Broadwell Defended Petraeus’ Village Destruction Policy

Petraeus

WASHINGTON, Nov 15 2012 (IPS) - Paula Broadwell, whose affair with Gen. David Petraeus brought his career to a sudden end last week, had sought to help defend his decision in 2010 to allow village destruction in Afghanistan that not only violated his own previous guidance but the international laws of war.


The new Petraeus policy guidance allowed the destruction of villages in three districts of Kandahar province if the population did not tell U.S. forces where homemade bombs were hidden.But her efforts had the opposite effect.

In early January 2010, Broadwell went to visit the Combined Task Force I-320th in Kandahar to write a story justifying the decision to destroy the village of Tarok Kaloche and much of three other villages in its area of operations.

Ironically, it was Broadwell who introduced the complete razing of the village of Tarok Kalache in in Kandahar’s Arghandab Valley in October 2010 to the blogosphere. Dramatic photographs of the village before and after it was razed, which she had obtained from U.S. military sources, were published with her article in the military blog Best Defense Jan. 13, 2011.

The pictures and her article brought a highly critical response from blogger Joshua Foust, who is a specialist on Afghanistan.

Tarok Kalache was only one of many villages destroyed or nearly destroyed in an October 2010 offensive by U.S. forces in three districts of Kandahar Province, because the heavy concentrations of IEDs had made clearing the village by conventional forces too costly.

In the late summer and early fall, commanders in those districts had been ordered to clear the villages of Taliban presence, but they had taken heavy casualties from IEDs planted in and around the villages.

As commander of Combined Task Force I-320th, Lt. Col. David Flynn was responsible for several villages in the Arghandab valley, including Tarok Kalache.

Flynn told Spencer Ackerman of the Danger Room blog in early February 2011 that, once he felt he had the necessary intelligence on IEDs in Tarok Kalache, he had adopted a plan to destroy the village, first with mine clearing charges, which destroyed everything within a swath 100 yards long and wide enough for a tank, then with aerial bombing. More