Who Me? Ninja!

I might be stirring the hornet’s nest here. So be it.

Late last year standing outside my office in Mumbai, surrounded by a posse of alms seekers, and feeling no empathy for them (we are pretty immune in India), I had a couple of quick thoughts.

1. Every human being should serve a purpose if she or he is willing and physically / mentally able
2. Over population can also be read as an opportunity to tap massive human resources (credit for this reasoning goes to Amit Varma of India Uncut)
3. Energy resources are depleting
4. What can we do with this posse of alms seekers?

BANG!

Get them to generate power!

How?

Rig up a power station with treadmills and get the homeless / under privileged but otherwise healthy adults to run on them for 2-4 hours a day and create electricity to power Mumbai.

Offer incentives like proper housing, schooling for kids, medical treatment and overall rehabilitation. Let them earn their living as the so called privileged class does.

Mumbai had 300,000 estimated beggars in 2006. If every person generates 100W, think of the energy potential. I’m no mathematician but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t light up a bulb.

However, the idea has gone through a few iterations. As it turns out, treadmills are rather power hungry with 1500W needed to run them. Using exercise bikes or bicycles are a more feasible solution.

Also, there are a few raised eyebrows. Is this in some way akin to slavery or perhaps is it a human rights violation? Perhaps not. If rehabilitation is thought out intelligently, and with more empathy than I can muster, this might just prove beneficial to the underprivileged. There is a give and take involved. A man who no one would hire (socialite aunties can snub their noses now) pedals 4 hours a day and the state offers him a better standard of living. Employment opportunities are created and energy requirements have a rather large finite range. Everybody gets a job, albeit a temporary one till the person can stand on his own two feet and hopefully not too wobbly from all that exercise.

This doesn’t end here. Communities can set up their own energy camps. With the proper state sponsored rig, small societies can power their own homes and offices.

Out of the way, stuck in the wilderness villages, forgotten or ignored people, can power their own region with this rig. Schools can be powered up. That light bulb that lets the child study after sun down can be powered up. Think about it.

So what are the questions still pending?

Well… one biggie is of the human condition. How does one motivate a beggar to accept this opportunity? Rationally, if she’s able, there is no reason why she shouldn’t. But then, rationality isn’t really our strength.

Also, how can the bicycle rig be designed to be cost effective? Think of it from a third world perspective. We have so many engineers, if you know anyone who might have an idea, please ask them to get in touch. I really do want to play around with this thought. The target to be generated is 100W or more with 2-4 hours of pedaling.

Finally, will the local government be open to this? What are the barriers it can put up? Let’s discuss this point. Seriously.

Frankly, human generated energy is not a new idea. Nor is using bicycles for that matter.

1. Village schools in Africa are powered by 45 minutes of play on a see saw.
2. A merry go round enables village women to draw water from a well.
3. A gym powers its air conditioners with the use of treadmills.
4. Dancers in a nightclub help generate enough power to keep it running all night long.

The solutions are everywhere. They are fun. And they are human. Need some more inspiration? Check out this post from GreenDiary.com.

Have an opinion? Share it with me and the rest of the readers. Hate this idea? Let’s slug it out. Love this idea? Let’s work on it.

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Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into faecal-phobic and faecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter.

- from The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Chinese use biogas to cook, clean and light up their houses. Biogas is produced in-house from a mix of human and pig excreta. Units called digesters essentially convert the poop into essential fuel and houses in rural areas have this facility. The Chinese are not squeamish about poop. In rural areas they have open door loos called Ni Hao or Hello and you can chat while you download your brown load. Interesting. In fact in the early part of the 20th Century, the folks in the business of carrying fertile poop to the farmers were called “Shit Lords” and a gangster’s moll who controlled the flow of poopilizer in the Shanghai docks was called the Queen of Poop. Both the parties didn’t particularly mind their nicknames.

Now coming to India, our battle against caste system begins and ends with poop. We’ve looked upon it with disgust and crinkled our noses at the folks who carried it away from our homes. A common “cure” for being touched by the shadow of an untouchable was to ingest cow dung and cow pee, and that’s just nuts, or a load of bull, and I can’t seem to get past poop cliches.

So Rose George is right. We are squeamish. They are not. The truth is that we are running out of fuel and they’ve figured how to make their own. India imports crops, China’s paddy fields are doing Tai Chi Chuan in happiness. The Chinese are proud of their fruits. They say that Night Soil or poop used as fertilizer makes their fruits juicier.

And just for that, I will stay away from Chinese Apples. They are perfect, big, green and crunchy and with a little too much happiness than I can handle.

Rose George’s book The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste is all about poop – where it goes, where it should go, what it does, what it should do and a whole lot more.  I’m half way through the book and we have traveled half way around the world from the biogas plants of China to the Sulabhs of India, the overflowing loos of South African schools to the sewers of London and New York. And she makes a fantastic traveling companion. She’s funny, insightful and full of curiosity. It helps she’s a good writer.

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