One of my favorite things about camping is that I get a chance to break out my Petzl MYO 5 Xenon Head Lamp. It has five tiny Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) as well as a larger flood light (in case a companion falls down a bottomless pit). When I first attach the unit to my head some people smirk and comment that I look a little silly. Inevitably, they are all begging me for use of its luminosity by the end of the night. But here is the best part: I bought my headlamp three years ago and have used it on countless camping trips and all night hikes, and it’s STILL running on the original set of 4 batteries. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the great benefits that the tiny LED could bring to rural India:

As many as 1.5 billion people - nearly 80 million in India alone - light their houses using kerosene as the primary lighting media. The fuel is dangerous, dirty, and - despite being subsidized - consumes nearly 4 percent of a typical rural Indian household’s budget. A recent report by the Intermediate Technology Development Group suggests that indoor air pollution from such lighting media results in 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year.

LED lamps, or more specifically white LEDS, are believed to produce nearly 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp and almost 50 times the amount of useful light of a conventional bulb.

“This technology can light an entire rural village with less energy than that used by a single conventional 100 watt light bulb,” says Dave Irvine-Halliday, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada and the founder of Light Up the World Foundation (LUTW). Founded in 1997, LUTW has used LED technology to bring light to nearly 10,000 homes in remote and disadvantaged corners of some 27 countries like India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and the Philippines.

As the article mentions, at least one village has already been transformed by Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation (GSBF), a Bombay-based nongovernmental organization that has created a solar powered LED unit that costs only $55. Once installed the energy is obviously free of charge. The key to this is to convince the Indian government that this is much more cost effective than spending money to light India in the conventional way. To do this you would have to lower the $55 per unit cost. This can be done if the solar cells were locally manufactured. This in turn could provide employment benefits in the communities doing the manufacturing.

[The founder of the NGO] wants to set up an LED manufacturing unit and a solar panel manufacturing unit in India. If manufactured locally, the cost of his LED lamp could plummet to $22, as they won’t incur heavy import duties. “But we need close to $5 million for this,” he says. “And investments are difficult to come by.”

Mr. Chaddha says he has also asked the government to exempt the lamps from such duties, but to no avail.

A measly five million in exchange for such widespread change? This sounds like exactly the type of thing Bill and Melinda Gates would want to fund. It is a shame though that the Indian government doesn’t just wave the duties on something that would vastly improve its infrastructure.

The lamps provided by GSBF have enough power to provide just four hours of light a day. But that’s enough for people to get their work done in the early hours of the night, and is more reliable than light generated off India’s electrical grid.

Before the LED lamps came, spending Rs. 40 (a little less than a dollar) each month on kerosene was too much. Jadhav earns just Rs. 50 a day as a contract laborer, and supports a family of five. “Now the money saved,” he says with a smile, “goes into the children’s education.”