‘Solar Man’ resigns as IIT-B professor, hopes to take his Energy Swaraj Yatra overseas

MUMBAI: Chetan Singh Solanki , a senior faculty member at IIT Bombay, popularly known as ‘Solar Man’ and ‘Solar Gandhi of India’, has now resigned from one of the country’s most coveted teaching posts to step into a far harder role — persuading a billion people that human survival now hangs in the balance.For him, climate change is no longer a distant policy debate but a “global emergency” already at the doorstep. He leads the change he asks of others. He works out of an office that breathes without air conditioning, and his consultation halls are lit not by fluorescent tubes but by daylight. His home does without the quiet hum of a refrigerator or the comfort of a water heater. After five years of the Energy Swaraj Yatra — journeying through cities, towns, and villages carrying only a message — save energy and materials or lose the future.

His story begins in Nemit, asmall village in Madhya Pradesh. He studied in a oneroom school where one teacher taught five grades at once, went on to earn his engineering degree in Indore, master’s at IIT Bombay, and joined Texas Instruments.The world of semiconductors, however, left him unsettled. He wanted to work on technology that could benefit villages in India. That is when he switched to solar technology and went for a PhD in Europe but with a clear target and timeline to come back to India.

In 2004, he returned to IIT Bombay, as a faculty member and took up the cause of popularising solar energy. He found purpose when he launched the Solar Urja Lamp Project, which provided solar lamps to 75 lakh families across 40,000 villages in India.In 2019, he travelled across 30 countries to promote solar energy.That journey made him realise the world is getting deeper into environmental degradation, global warming, and climate change crises.