{"id":376,"date":"2013-08-22T16:46:23","date_gmt":"2013-08-22T16:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blogs\/?p=376"},"modified":"2017-07-25T09:22:13","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T13:22:13","slug":"bringing-the-energy-to-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/bringing-the-energy-to-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing the energy to India"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi, I\u2019m Rosanna Sanderson (center), an environmental engineer\u00a0based in AECOM\u2019s Brisbane, Australia office. Together with my fellow AECOM colleagues Johannes Wilson (right) and Belinda Dods (left), I\u2019ve been selected to take part in Pollinate Energy<\/a>\u2019s Young Professionals Program. We\u2019ll be blogging about our adventures in India \u2013 and about the important work we\u2019ll be doing with Pollinate while here \u2013 over the next few weeks. <\/i>Below is\u00a0our first post; please share our journey with us!<\/i><\/p>\n

Stepping out of the airport, the humidity hits. We\u2019re here!<\/p>\n

The Pollinate Energy office-cum-home is an oasis in the middle of the chaos that is Bangalore. Our first full day today saw us meet the other members of our team, which, in addition to Johannes, Belinda and I, includes two other Australians and three Indian young professionals. Two of these three are Bangalore locals, which will help with the language barrier, and one is from Delhi. All, however, have very interesting backgrounds and insights into Indian ways of life!<\/p>\n

\"Pollinate<\/a><\/p>\n

Bangalore at night.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today we also got to hear a bit more of Pollinate Energy\u2019s background from two of the not-for-profit\u2019s directors. The story goes like this: a few years ago, Kat \u2013 one of the co-founders \u2013 was finishing her Masters thesis, which investigated the “willingness to pay” for energy products within urban slum communities.<\/p>\n

The night before the dissertation was due, Kat was on a plane heading back to London to submit the work that had been consuming her for months. But as they took off from the Delhi airport, the lights below them began to blink out across huge stretches of land.<\/p>\n

Later, they learned they had witnessed the world\u2019s single largest power outage in history \u2013 700 million people without power on the night of the 31 July 2012 \u2013 in what was front page news around the world.<\/p>\n

And yet, as bad as it was, Kat knew more than 400 million people in India were constantly\u00a0without power, but that <\/i>fact never made the news.<\/p>\n

Pollinate Energy was thus built out of the realisation of the need to address energy poverty across India. It\u2019s a great story that we\u2019re now lucky enough to be contributing to!<\/p>\n

Today wasn’t all work though; we also had the opportunity to see a side of Bangalore that we may not have otherwise seen. Our guide, Rohan was a wealth of history, culture, and religion.<\/p>\n

\"Pollinate<\/a><\/p>\n

Women shopping in Bangalore.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We saw the Sikh temple where no god is worshiped but everyday hundreds of people are fed, and if you need somewhere to stay, they always have room. We also visited a dobhi ghat (pictured below) \u2013 a huge expanse of lines, large chunks of granite,\u00a0and a complex network of pipes and tanks, which together acts as the clothes-washing hub for many of the city’s fancy hotels and companies \u2013 as well as a Hindu cemetery and goddess Kali black magic temple, where curses can be both cast and removed.<\/p>\n

\"Pollinate<\/a><\/p>\n

The Dobhi Ghat.<\/p>\n

Hindus are more often cremated, which makes this cemetery unusual – instead of being buried lying down, the residents of this cemetery are buried sitting up, ready to greet the next cycle of life.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow we will be meeting our local Pollinators, testing out our first fuel-efficient cookstoves, and visiting our first communities to demonstrate the stoves.<\/p>\n

You’ll be hearing how we go!<\/p>\n

-Rosie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi, I\u2019m Rosanna Sanderson (center), an environmental engineer\u00a0based in AECOM\u2019s Brisbane, Australia office. Together with my fellow AECOM colleagues Johannes Wilson (right) and Belinda Dods (left), I\u2019ve been selected to take part in Pollinate Energy\u2019s Young Professionals Program. We\u2019ll be blogging about our adventures in India \u2013 and about the important work we\u2019ll be doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":82,"featured_media":406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[138,66],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corporate-social-responsibility","tag-impact","tag-pollinate-india"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/82"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aecom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}