Powering primary healthcare through solar in India: lessons from Chhattisgarh
The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), issued a new report concluding that distributed solar energy can play a major role in bridging India’s massive gap in delivering rural healthcare services, both as a primary and backup source of power. Currently, 1 in 2 rural Primary Health Centers (PHCs) in India suffer from lack of electricity or irregular power supply, with over 38 million households depending on PHCs that have zero electricity access. The CEEW report, Powering Primary Healthcare through Solar in India: Lessons from Chhattisgarh, is based on a two-stage stratified random sampling of 147 PHCs in the state of Chhattisgarh, and found that nearly 98% of PHCs said that solar helped with day-to-day functions.