Keeping up with Climate Tech vol. 4

About 300 million Indians currently live off-grid, mostly in rural areas. Most are farmers who make around $4 a day in household income and often struggle to pursue productive, income-generating activities because of unstable power supply. This is an especially acute problem in eastern India, in states like Jharkhand and Odisha.

Rea Savla, Harvard Business School MBA ‘24, and Vishesh Mehta, MBA ‘26, both of whom had field work experience in agriculture, decided to work together to find a solution to this complex issue.

“We didn’t want to go in with a hypothesis on what the solution to this problem should be, but really to try to understand the most pressing problems facing rural Indian communities,” Savla said in an interview with the Harvard Technology Review. “And so we went on a year and a half-long journey into just understanding the market.”

Savla and Mehta spent all of their breaks going to India and conducting field interviews in dozens of villages across multiple states, reading academic research papers, and talking to policymakers and other practitioners in the space.

“We found that access to water and access to energy were the two main barriers to income growth for these farmers,” she added.

Starting out with Solara

The initial solution the duo came up with was Solara, a tool intended to make irrigation more affordable using solar energy. Solar can be 70% cheaper than diesel, which is what most of these off-grid farms are using in India, so the government has taken major strides subsidizing and really trying to promote adoption of solar power. 

“We didn’t want to rely on any brand subsidy or impose a large upfront cost on farmers, so we settled on a pay per use model,” Savla said. “We take a fixed asset and we spread out the cost across the community by sharing that asset. This way, we can bring down something that traditionally has a 10- to 20-year payback cycle down to a less-than-two-year cycle.”

Savla and Mehta took their idea to all major startup competitions at Harvard — the New Venture Competition, the President’s Innovation Challenge, and the Mittal Institute’s Seed for Change — and placed first at all of these. Savla also was named a Cheng Fellow with Harvard Kennedy School’s Social Innovation and Change Initiative for Solara.

It was at the implementation stage, though, that the team gained a crucial insight. After designing and building portable solar irrigation kits, they tested them in the market, where they found that the product had to be more affordable and that weather-based variability made it difficult to have predictable irrigation sessions and for farmers to effectively use the kits so they could have a successful harvest.

“It was this unreliability that we needed to fix, so we started thinking about batteries, since they’re a fixed store of energy,” Savla added. We can charge these batteries on solar and wind and then share these batteries out with the community.”

They soon realized that the issue they were tackling spanned all farm operations — grinding, milling, cold storage, and transportation. By building interoperable battery packs that can be used to power any of these appliances, they could make farmers’ lives easier and make Indian agriculture greener. 

That’s how they came upon their current venture, Zor, where they’re building modular lithium ion batteries and programming the software for the batteries to work on a variety of appliances and be charged in challenging, rural settings.

Savla said that the team has faced several hurdles in operating in rural India. Succeeding as a business in these communities requires a high touch approach; you have to be always available and willing to get to work.

“It’s a tough arena. Sometimes there are components you need that you think will be available in any market, but they aren’t available for hours worth of radius from where you are,” she shared. “We’ve learned to order 20% extra of any commodity now, and to pay a bus driver extra to bring us some materials instead of relying on shipping. We learned these things with time, and other things we rely on our partners for.”

Cementing trust with communities and partners is one of the key drivers Savla and the Zor team found to be significant in achieving success in India.

“There’s unfortunately been a history of companies who have exploited these rural communities, so there’s some hesitancy when it comes to trying out new products initially,” she said. We’ve tried addressing this by partnering with nonprofit organizations as well as farmer-producer organizations to communicate to the communities we’re in. And our field staff has been very involved in the community.”

The Indian government’s subsidies for electric vehicles and policies about battery swapping stations have served as significant tailwinds for Zor. 

“A lot of people are hoping for some degree of battery standardization to happen in the next year or so,” Savla mentioned. “The more standardization there is, the easier it is to build in bulk, and then easier it is for slightly unconventional interpretations of battery storage like ours. We’re at a really early stage right now, but we’re super optimistic about the segment.”

Zor just launched their first battery sharing station on the week of November 4. The team aims to continue developing that side of the business.

“We want to use this pilot as a case study to see what is possible when we scale this up,” Savla said. “So for the immediate future, our goals are really perfecting our delivery model, using this customer feedback to perfect our product, and then doing a rollout in a year or two in a more skilled way with all the insights that we’re learning from running this one job right now.”