#Watch #Chaudhry #Solar #foryou: Hotwiring rural Punjab

Muhammad Nazam pulls his smartphone from his kurta pocket, opens the YouTube app and plays a tutorial. “It’s not that difficult, you know,” he says. “It’s just two wires: one is hot, and one is cold.” That’s how he installed solar panels a year ago for his tubewell in Qila Mian Singh, Punjab.

His neighbour Salim Mehr, clarifies, “When it’s installed, then everyone gets the experience. Everyone knows which wire is which, which button to press, how much to run it on, how many units are showing up, how much electricity there is.”

This is the part of Pakistan’s solar revolution that didn’t make it to international headlines. News feature after feature marveled at an energy transition motivated less by climate worries and more by the state’s persistent inability to provide electricity people could rely on and afford. (China’s untrammelled ability to provide cheap imports was a decisive factor.) It made sense that rich city households were rigging up, but what was driving the wildfire uptake across the countryside where, according to thinktank Ember Energy, 73% of panel owners are now located.

Turns out there are two unexpected mechanisms at work: the effect of seeing a Chaudary install it and the ease of figuring out how to do it. Muhammad Imran and Muhammad Rizwan, for example, living half a province away from each other, had identical experiences with their solar PV installation. They asked the shopkeeper how to do it, watched a couple of TikTok videos, and did it themselves within an hour. All Obaid Ullah needed was TikTok to set up his single panel at his kiryana or corner shop. “It’s not a problem,” he says. “It’s very easy.” The panel, which is propped up with a stick, now powers a small cooler at his store.

Spending several months across the rural countryside in Punjab, Zainaab spotted solar panels propped up on bamboo sticks, lying down amidst wheatfields, and spoke to people who brought them there. Travel for this research involved eight districts split evenly between North and South Punjab. She interviewed thirty-four people, mostly rural residents, especially large-scale (landlords) and small-scale (tenant and self-owned) farmers. She also spoke with solar panel importers and distributors, members of the Ministry of Energy and the Prime Minister’s Solarization Committee.

The research confirmed many prior insights, including, most prominently, the breakdown in trust in the state’s ability to fix the electricity grid and the resulting death spiral from utility bills. But two other findings stand out: the demonstration effect of rich landlords installing solar on their land and the ease with which such panels can be installed using social media. Even though they are critically influencing the rural uptake of solar, both dimensions have been curiously underexplored.

Most new technologies find their first wave of adopters in well-off urban dwellers. Those with high rates of education, mobility, and wealth have both the knowledge of new technologies and the financial bandwidth to adopt them. For Pakistan, this meant that solarization’s initial home was in the DHAs and Bahria Towns of the country. The residential make-up of these housing societies includes a cross-section of Pakistan’s elite, a central faction of which is the traditional landlord. These are families that have historically owned large swathes of cultivated land, and........

© Dawn Prism