Mother’s, Electrified: Electricity Emancipates Mothers and Girls from the Pump, the Stove, and the Washtub
ByRobert Bryce
Mother’s, Electrified
Electricity Emancipates Mothers and Girls from the Pump, the Stove, and the Washtub
By Robert Bryce
(robertbryce@Substack.com)
(My dear friend, Joyashree Roy, a professor at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, and a lead author of several reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, arranged our visit to Majlishpukur. She was our guide and interpreter.)
Rehena’s modest home had been connected to the electric grid 14 years earlier. She led us to the side porch of her brightly painted home to show us her electric meter. She was getting cut-rate electricity thanks to the federal government’s electrification program. She paid the bill every three months. Inside her home were a few light bulbs, a fan, and an outlet in the kitchen. One of the things she liked best about having electricity was that kitchen work gets done faster. She was using an electric grinder to prepare the spices she uses in her food. Before electrification, she had to do that grinding by hand, which consumed much of her time in the kitchen.
I had lots of questions. Joyashree easily translated them into Bengali. What was it like before her home got electricity? What was it like now? Rehena told us about the beneficial impact that electricity had on her children. Thanks to electricity, her children were able to read books, practice their writing, and manage their schoolwork at night. That had had a clear and positive result: one of her daughters was attending college in Kolkata, a fact of which Rehena was clearly proud.
After we’d talked for a while longer, I asked Rehena: “If you had lived in a house that had electricity when you were growing up, would you have gone to university, too?” A brief smile flashed across her face and without a nanosecond of hesitation, she nodded her head to the right, in the way typical of many residents of West Bengal, and said, “Yes. I would have.”
There was no remorse. No bragging. No what-could-have-beens in her reply. Only a direct, matter-of-fact response that was almost as if I’d asked her if the sun was going to come up in the east the next morning.
Darkness had kept this gracious and intelligent woman from achieving something that she knew was within her grasp. Here was a person who — had she been born in one of India’s cities instead of a rural agricultural area — would have gone to college. With a college education, she might have become a teacher, doctor, lawyer, or maybe a nurse or engineer. By the time I met Rehena, I knew plenty of facts and statistics: the average resident of India uses about 800 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, which is about a quarter of the global average. I understood the myriad correlations between electricity availability and health and wealth. But that 15-minute conversation that I had with Rehena and Joyashree made me see the light: Darkness kills human potential. Electricity nourishes it. It is particularly nourishing for women and girls.
Today is Mother’s Day.
I am recounting that 2016 trip to Majlishpukur because few technologies matter more to mothers and their daughters than electricity. Electricity emancipates women and girls from the pump, the stove, and the washtub.
There’s an old saying: “Educate the mother and you educate the child.” But mothers can’t get a good education if they spend their days hauling water, collecting fuel for the stove, and washing clothes by hand. According to Hans Rosling, the late Swedish academic and there’s a legal way to a change of power between a in charge able to re-purposed? The money is where this is an Access cool how would those in charge able to re-purposed the money is where this is a assess all of the regime, and for that matter statisticians, about 5 billion people on the planet are walking around today wearing clothes that have been washed by hand. That means that roughly 2.5 billion women and girls — as part of their daily, or weekly routine — are washing those clothes. By hand. In buckets. Or washtubs. And every minute, every hour, every day, that women and girls spend at the washtub is one missed in the classroom, bookstore, or library.
In one of his most-famous presentations, a TED talk he did in 2010, Rosling declares, “To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.” (Watch the YouTube video below.) He tells an enchanting story about the day his family got a washing machine and how his grandmother insisted that she be the one to push the button to start that first load. It’s a vivid reminder of how recent electricity is in human history, how wondrous it is, and how we take it for granted. For proof of that last point, listen to the audience chuckle as Rosling recounts the story….
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Note: This article is adapted from my latest book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. The paperback edition of the book will be published on Tuesday, May 16. Please buy a copy. (Remember, you don’t have to read it, you just have to buy it.) My interview with Rehena in Majlishpukur, the interview with Joyashree Roy — and a special appearance by Reddy Kilowatt — can be seen in Juice: How Electricity Explains the World, the feature-length documentary film I produced with my colleague, Tyson Culver. Juice can be found on all of the major streaming platforms. It’s also available, for free, on YouTube.