Gujarat start-up’s clean energy line-up for rural India

Greenway Grameen Infra, whose high-efficiency smokeless biomass stove is making waves, plans to launch a stove that generates power like an inverter, and a water chiller in the country’s rural areas where electricity is a problem.

The startup, launched five years ago, has reached Mexico with its smokeless stoves and expects to quadruple its export of about 2,000 units a month in the next couple of years, its co-founder said.

“Our new prototype of a power-run water chiller, which can also run on solar energy, is being tested now. The other new product, a stove that generates electricity, the poor man’s inverter, should be launched later this year,” Neha Juneja, Co-Founder, Greenway, told BusinessLine on Tuesday. Taking an unconventional route to make cleaner and smarter stoves for nearly 15 crore Indian households surviving below the poverty line (BPL), Neha Juneja and Ankit Mathur, both MBA graduates, set up India’s largest biomass cook stove factory at Vadodara, Gujarat, in 2010.With a capacity to make eight lakh “chulhas” (stoves), that use wood and agro-waste as fuel, it has already sold over 2.60 lakh stoves across India, mainly in the southern states, since 2012.

“We now plan to tie up with public sector banks and micro-finance companies to penetrate rural markets more deeply, particularly in Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,” she said.

The Mumbai-headquartered company has already tied up with microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. “This assured repayment of loans and helped us reach out to more villagers. In Kerala, for instance, we sold over 70,000 stoves through MFIs, with most buyers paying only Rs. 65 per week.”

Greenway Grameen Infra, a start-up of the IIM-Ahmadabad’s technology business incubator, the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), evolved as a profitable product design and distribution start-up, aiming to serve rural India through quality-of-life-enhancing home-appliances. With its biomass cook stove, it aims to replace use of traditional mud stoves (chulhas), that adversely affect health and environment and achieve greater scale.

“Our flagship product, the Greenway Smart Stove, is a high-efficiency cook stove that burns all biomass fuels (wood, cow dung, etc.) while reducing smoke by 70 per cent, fuel use by 65 per cent and GHG emissions by 1.5 tonnes per annum,” she said.

Currently, the firm markets two stoves of different sizes, priced at Rs. 1,399 and Rs. 2,499. The idea of Greenway Cook Stoves was born when Mathur and Juneja, fresh from IIM-Ahmadabad and FMS Delhi, were traveling through rural areas to undertake energy projects. The stoves are also certified by the Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy Resources and some subsidy made available in tribal areas.

Greenway was one of the two Indian companies to have won the Ashden Clean Energy for Women and Girls Award at the International Ashden Awards 2014. It received seed funding of Rs. 20 lakh from CIIE and another Rs. 40 lakh from an angel investor. In addition, the Clinton Global Initiative’s Global Alliance for Cook Stoves, headed by Hillary Clinton, also contributed Rs. 1 crore.