Leapfrogging Possibilities For Sustainable Consumption and ...

increased the speed of doing things, enhancing social connectivity between different
cultures.
These all happening while avoiding not only the direct emissions of transporting people
and materials but also the indirect environmental impact of the need for constructing
infrastructures and vehicles for such kind of transports. Considering only the direct
energy use and thus emissions, a simple example shows that a videoconference requires
500 times less energy than a business trip requiring a 1000 km flight, and the disparity
increases with distance.
Solar Power
The solar energy case shows how this can be done even in the absence of advanced
technical know-how with some effort of capacity building of local community by the
Social Work and Research Center (SWRC), aka Barefoot College in India. SWRC is a
Non-governmental organization founded in 1972 at Tilonia, Rajasthan, India. It was
started to solve local community level problems such as drinking water, girl education,
health & sanitation, rural unemployment, income generation, electricity and power, as
well as social awareness and the conservation of ecological systems in rural India.
SWRC has trained over 340 semi-literate men and women from 16 states in India and 9
other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Nearly 11,000 solar household
systems and over 5,000 solar lanterns provide clean energy and light to more than
125,000 people.
In India alone, the socio-economic benefit of this initiative includes:
• Solar electrifying 300 adult education centres, or night schools.
• Solar electrifying 870 schools across the country.
• 28 remote and inaccessible villages in Ladakh have 40 Kws of solar panels that
provide three hours of light in the bleakest winter to 1 530 families.
• 350 villages and hamlets(clusters) have been covered where a total number of 12
000 households have been solar electrified.
This means an improvement on the health of the students that otherwise would have to
use kerosene and oil lanterns. The empowerment dimension is important as all solar
panels have been installed, maintained and repaired by the village people without the
assistance of any qualified engineer.
Environmentally, hundreds of thousands of litres of kerosene were saved due to this solar
electrification effort and thus avoiding carbon dioxide emissions. Over 1.67 million tons
of carbon emissions are saved annually as a result of the Barefoot activity.
Iron and Steel
The technological advancement of South Korea in the iron and steel sector is one
example of leapfrogging at the sectoral level. South Korea did leapfrog from almost no
Iron and Steel industry to surpass technological leaders in the sector.
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