It was an operation with a difference for Sankara Nethralaya, the institution engaged in bringing back the ‘Light of Vision’ rose admirably to the challenge of bringing in the sunlight into its premises to augment its energy needs through solar energy. The institution realized that leveraging solar energy was not only a cost saving measure but a moral responsibility, in a region blessed with perennial and abundant sunshine and the high cost accrued by the government towards generating power. Once the decision to go ‘Green’ and go ‘Solar’ was taken, the technical team at Sankara Nethralaya’s main campus did an elaborate search and evaluation of companies engaged in harnessing sunlight into electricity and ‘SHAN Solar’ was selected after strict scrutiny of cost and capabilities and after taking into account their extensive experience, flawless track record in execution and high accreditations in the field.

After a thorough evaluation of the need for energy and availability of space it was decided to install rooftop solar plants which would generate a total of 121.68Kwp plant across 12,000 sq ft of rooftop space spread over the CU Shah Sankara Nethralaya, Nava Suja Sankara Nethralaya and Jaslok Community Ophthalmology Centre. In a wonderful demonstration of coordination and team work between the vendor’s installation team and Sankara Nethralaya’s technical team the same was installed in a record time of 60 days, the critical process of connecting the solar energy system to the internal electricity grid was completed in a record of 1 hour duration in all locations, the noteworthy feature of the entire operation being its total non-interference with the day to day functioning of the hospital.

The solar energy harnessing process adopted at Sankara Nethralaya comes with an almost 0% maintenance cost, the results have been highly encouraging and reflect significant savings within a short span of their operation, it is to be borne in mind that these savings would be recurrent in nature and would also keep enhancing as the tariff on State supplied power keeps escalating every year.

As an institution Sankara Nethralaya has come for praise not only for its clinical best practises but also for its self sustaining economic model and this initiative would be a strategic move in this direction, as a service oriented non-profit the institution believes in expending every penny most frugally and judiciously and the colossal savings in energy cost would be one more effort towards this. Last but not the least the massive reduction in its carbon footprint by 150 tonnes a year comes as a matter of great relief and true value addition to an environment conscious and ecology friendly institution.