An estimated 240 million Indians live without electricity. Due to a lack of cold storage infrastructure, 30 per cent of the harvested crop spoils before it reaches the market. Niraj Marathe is developing sustainable energy solutions to tackle this problem. In 2014, he graduated from the Technical University of Berlin with a Master’s degree in solar technology. Supported by the Migration & Development Programme, he joined the SELCO Foundation as a returning expert in the same year, taking on a position as project manager.

In the states of Karnataka and Bihar, he worked on solar projects and, together with his team, installed five micro-electricity grids in rural areas with little or no electricity. This improved living conditions for 700 people. In 2016, Marathe founded his social business CoolCrop, which builds solar-powered cold storage units for agricultural produce. It has already put 28 of these into operation, making them available to a total of 8,000 small farmers in eight Indian regions. A mobile phone app trains the farmers in using the facility. With a size of 25 cubic metres, the cold storage unit holds up to 4,000 kilograms of the harvested crop. As a result, the user communities – mostly cooperatives – are able to preserve their crops and increase their income by around 25 per cent.