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ADIRE is a registered charitable trust in India with a mission to improve the lives of rural poor, applying appropriate modern technology, renewable energy and local capacity building for reviving cost effective and environment friendly village clusters of ancient India.
In this twenty first century, urbanized developed countries can hardly believe that rural households in many parts of the world still live without electricity, clean cooking fuel, running water, basic hygiene and other necessities of life. For example, India alone has over 600,000 villages with 700 million people of which only 30 percent have access to electricity and clean cooking fuel. The modern city-based development paradigm, engaged in material comforts and heavy natural resource use, hardly touches the lives of hundred million rural households in India and four hundred million households in the developing world. This 30% of the world with income less than one dollar a day have entered the new century struggling for food and nourishment. They lack shelters to protect themselves from cyclones, floods, earthquakes, normal rain, or extreme climates. Still, they are the people who will be affected the most by the externality costs of natural resources depletion, climate changes, and pollution from the massive urbanization.
The kerosene subsidies meant to provide illumination for poor do not remove poverty rather perpetuate darkness, diseases, drudgery, and deprivations; and electric grid subsidy without solving these problems adds corruption to the above list of problems in the villages. The governments though make tall claims to give subsidized electrcity to poor cannot do so as the technology is expensive, unreliable, and inappropriate for village environment. The villagers still have to use biomass cooking, kersosene lamps and manual tools due to high costs, poor quality and reliability of grid electricity. They see no opportunities for income or skill development in their native land and migrate to cities as a squatter population to live in slums. Urban poverty, though rampant in developing countries, is nothing but the manifestation of such desperate rural out-migration.
Sustainable development of these villages in an integrated manner can avoid unnecessary migration. The villages cannot develop without health & sanitation, electricity, education, infrastructure, and local employment opportunity that empower them to control their own destiny. Are these problems so difficult to solve? Probably not. The village cultures of developing countries have not only survived for thousand of years by respecting the nature, but were also the seats of free market private enterprises and democratic decision making with minimal roles of monopolies, governments, or external power. It is possible to continue that culture without compromising the modern urban-like life-styles by deploying the modern technology, locally avaialable renewable energy, and private interests those are all aviable today in the modern societies. This belief led to the development of the ADIRE initiative.
We are a dedicated team of engineers, doctors, accountant, economists, IT professionals and rural development experts spread all over the world. We believe, we can put together a replicable rural development model without subsidy encouraging rural people to learn new skills and take pride in paying for the services they get from our projects.
Started in 2003 from a small village in Orissa, a poor state in eastern part of India, ADIRE experimented with renewable energy to solve these problems in 3 villages Jahangirabad, Balabhadrapur and Kalyanpur (JABAKA) in Orissa and now expanding to other rural areas. With the development in new communication, computing, Internet, small modern energy technologies, ADIRE thought, it can make a change in rural lives. Solar photovoltaic, highly energy efficient color TVs, compact fluorescent/LED lamps, biomass powered rural enterprises, and manure based biogas cooking are some of its favorite technologies with a very high impact on quality of lifestyles. ADIRE brings modern solar light to remove rural darkness, connectivity to remove age-old rural isolation, clean and affordable energy to power homes and businesses, and modern skills to harness the intelligent but laid off rural talents for a sustainable rural livelihood. ADIRE will empower rural poor and challenge the world's rich to become more responsible or pay for the externality costs of outrageous resource consumption and environmental damages.
ADIRE's initiative is focussed on two fundamental concepts. Harness the local natural resources and Develop and Modernize the local skills with the objective of "psycho-social transformation and integrated sustainable rural development" in four major areas through four village centers called " HELP" Centers:
 Health & Hygiene
Energy & Fuel
Learning Skills and Basic Education
Production
Infrastructure
Economic Activities  Women Apparel by adi 'Kruti
To start with, ADIRE will provide the modern gadgets and maintain them for rural productivity growth in the Prodcution Centers, and will set up small power plants for providing reliable and affordable energy in its Energy Center for fueling village economy. It will provide skill training in the Learning Center, and will arrange micro finance for modern rural enterprises all of which have been neglected so far. ADIRE will also build and show-case modern energy efficient low cost housing, empower women with modern skills and risk capital without any need of significant subsidy. ADIRE does not see commercial operation of Health and sanitation services in a near future. But, in the absence of these services, villagers in their initial journey for sustainable development would most likley go bankrupt. ADIRE will provide water, sanitation, and health facilities at subsidized rate. By dealing with four long term deprivations -- diseases, drudgery,darkness, and disasters, ADIRE will work for proactive development of villages rather than first creating problems of urban migration, crimes, slums, corruption, and subsidies and reactively managing them later. Instead of participating in the four global encounters in Economy, Energy, Emission and Ecology areas, ADIRE will sprout the concept of "Happy life with clean energy" derived from physical, social and intellectual fulfillment effectively fuelled by the nature's widely scattered renewable power.
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