Lalith Seneviratne

Sixty percent of rural homes in Sri Lanka have no electricity and no chance of being connected to the national grid. As the cost of imported fuel continues to rise, it becomes more and more economically improbable that coverage can be extended. Lalith Seneviratne is bringing economic development to rural communities by helping them produce affordable and environmentally-friendly electricity using a crop they can cultivate throughout the year.

Lalith is developing a sustainable model for rural power generation that allows communities and villages that do not have grid-connected electricity to set up their own biomass-based electrification systems and reap the social and economic benefits.
The villages Lalith is assisting are in the dry zone of Sri Lanka, where villagers are dependent on rain for their largely subsistence cultivation and are among the poorest Sri Lankan citizens. Lalith encourages villages to form cooperatives and cultivate gliricidia wood, while employing their labour in the construction of a power plant. The gliricidia, a woody biomass, is well suited for the climatic conditions of the dry zone. The villagers are then trained to use the technology to run and maintain the power plant, which can then supply power to 60 rural homes.
This idea has the power to create a new rural industry, and the dry zone farmers stand to gain substantial income by cultivating this fast growing tree in increasingly larger areas. Unutilized land is abundant in the dry zone, thus farmers can cultivate and sell gliricidia wood to larger biomass power plants all year, providing a new steady source of income. The power sector also gains a new sustainable source of electricity available throughout the year.
Lalith recognizes the financial demands of this project. He saw the urgent need to get commercial banks to provide credit and partnership for this power venture, and thus established a link between a financial institution and villages. The financial institution will use electricity to reach the vast and under-utilized potential for microfinance in rural areas, thereby allowing rural people to access market rate credit, a privilege previously denied to them.

Centuries of colonial rule in Sri Lanka have been followed by decades of factional ‘democratic’ politics in which the majority of promises made by politicians are not kept. One of these unfilled promises is the grid-connected electrification of rural areas. Around 60 percent of rural households in Sri Lanka still do not have grid-connected electricity. The uncovered areas are primarily in remote parts of the country, and they remain the least prosperous. The lack of electricity contributes significantly to the deterioration of rural residents’ social and economic status and results in poor quality of health and educational services. In addition, it hampers agricultural productivity and prevents people from engaging in industrial activities.

Though the government has stated that it wishes to fully grid the island by 2010, the supply of electricity is not keeping pace with the growth in the energy needs of the country. Thus, even in the areas where the government has attempted rural edification programs, supply constraints create frequent power failures. The servicing to these areas by the government-owned electricity distributor is of poor quality, as villages generate very low returns due to their low power requirement relative to urban areas. In addition, with the rising cost of fossil fuels, upon which Sri Lanka grows increasingly dependent, the cost of grid-connected electricity continues to rise for poor rural residents.

The other available source of energy is hydropower from waterfalls in the hill country. This source has been significantly affected by the changing weather patterns and lightness of monsoon rainfalls. During droughts, power generation goes down to very low levels and island-wide power cuts are enforced. Thus, realistically, the rural communities have no hope for grid-connected electricity provided by the state in the next 20 years.

Because of the power crisis in Sri Lanka, the citizen sector has been experimenting with solar, wind, and mini-hydro projects to develop remote areas and to find alternate energy sources. But because of the lack of viability of rural area investments, they have remained in the experimental stage and have not been widely scaled. This is exacerbated by the fact that these methods are dependent on imported items such as solar panels and other accessories, making them uneconomical or unsustainable locally.

Another issue that limits development in rural areas is the absence of investment capital due to lack of established financial systems. This has resulted in exploitative money-lending and deep debt for rural farmers. Lalith’s research shows that the average debt of a rural farmer is Rs 25,000 per year. The exorbitant interest rates charged by the money lenders keeps farmers perpetually in debt, and in some cases leads to suicide when crop failure occurs. Lalith is convinced that only formal lending institutions and commercial banks can get the farmers out of this exploitative situation.

Lalith’s strategy for electrification of rural areas is to set up a business framework that allows rural biomass enterprises to be established and to grow.

Lalith saw that the problem of rural electrification can bring the remote communities together. Taking into consideration lessons that he learned from previous electrification schemes, he concluded that generating electricity from biomass would be the best option for the provision of community-based electricity in the rural dry zone. Earlier, Lalith, along with the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Bio Energy Association of Sri Lanka, had identified the gliricidia tree as one of the most suitable for use as biomass in power generation. They were able to demonstrate that gliricidia cultivation has multiple benefits: it creates employment for farmers in the rural areas, contributes to the development of the livestock industry, reduces soil erosion and restores degraded lands. The tree provides green manure from its foliage that allows farmers to decrease the use of artificial and expensive fertilizers, which they have come to depend upon for various reasons. The use of green manure also restores soil conditions and improves water retention. The biomass electrification system is CO2-neutral because trees absorb an equal quantity of CO2 as is emitted into the atmosphere. The ash and charcoal from the system also serves as a natural fertilizer and poses no environmental hazard.

Lalith set up a pilot community biomass power station in 2004 in a village called Endagalayaya. To fuel the generator, each household in the locality cultivates one-eighth of their land with gliricidia wood. The established power generation system provides electricity to 60 homes. A village cooperative run by elected representatives operate the system and charge a monthly tariff to each household for the provision of electricity. Lalith empowers the villagers with the technical knowledge to run the power plants and take on maintenance and management roles.

The second community-financed power generation system is in Maha Kivula, a village of 50 families. Lalith has facilitated a connection between the villagers and a well-recognized financial organization in Sri Lanka, a nonprofit investment fund in America, a German organization taking action to mitigate climate change and a family foundation in America, in order to finance the first cycle of loans for a series of combined plantation/power generating plants in the villages. As the idea takes root and spreads, he has since been receiving many requests from neighboring communities, whom he is also linking to the institutions.

Lalith is now in the process of setting up a social enterprise organization that would facilitate the implementation of the systems. He is also exploring the possibility of establishing large-scale biomass power generators -1 MW and above—that would allow villagers to cultivate large tracks of presently unutilized land and gain substantial revenue from selling bio-wood mass to the generators. He is working with national Bio Energy Association to promote the establishment of larger biomass power plants and assisting the formulating a regulatory and tariff framework for the operation of such power plants.

The K.L. Felicitas Foundation in the U.S. has awarded Lalith a three-year fellowship to develop a sustainable framework for the community-based biomass electricity generation schemes and provides overall strategic guidance to the initiative.

Growing up, Lalith spent most of his school holidays at his grandparents’ home in a village in distant Deniyaya. Spending time with 30 cousins who gathered there for the holidays, living close to nature, swimming in the clean river full of fish, and having fun in the green forests are his cherished childhood memories. It was not until he later went to London to study that he realized the value of the natural habitat of rural Sri Lanka. Decades later, he revisited these rural areas only to discover the extent to which environmental exploitation had changed the landscape. It was this realization that motivated him to become a conservationist.

Lalith Seneviratne completed his graduate degrees in electronics and electrical engineering in the United Kingdom and Canada. He creatively uses his engineering skills for his all of his conservation efforts, and brought the first fixed wireless telephone network in the world to Sri Lanka in 1988 while working for Motorola. He later became the head of Motorola in Sri Lanka, and then a consultant to a few international telecommunications firms operating in Sri Lanka. Lalith has now given up his consultancy to pursue his dream of rural electrification full-time.

Lalith’s first experience with mobilizing a community to solve a pressing problem was the development of a simple tripwire-based elephant intrusion alarm system to protect village crops. The simplicity of the design made it a community-owned affordable system against elephant crop-raiding, and it has now extended to other communities across the nation. With the funding from Asian Elephant Conservation Fund of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, he developed various other technological solutions to mitigate the human-elephant conflict, including the use of infrasound, the sound waves used by elephants to communicate, as a means to detect and deter elephants. Two of his own inventions could have been patented, but he continues to seek an exclusively social return on his projects. In 2002, he was invited to brief the Congressional Staff on Capitol Hill in recognition of the 5th Anniversary of the Asian Elephant Conservation Act.

Returning to his dream of rural electricity, Lalith setup a rural electrification program using a solar/wind renewable energy power plant to provide lighting to a village. This project facilitated power supply to 30 homes connected by an underground wiring network. With the cooperation of Canadian Light up the World Foundation, he has provided lighting to two villages with low-cost, high bright LED based solar photovoltaic lighting systems. However, Lalith found that these systems were not easily replicable due to the high initial outlay that had to be supported through external assistance. This understanding of the need to develop appropriate solutions for rural electrification that are based on local sustainable resources led him to his current project with biomass.

In recognition of his services to wildlife conservation and biodiversity, the Department of Wildlife Conservation has made Lalith an Honorary Director and member of the Fauna & Flora Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.