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Abhimanyu Singh Rathore on making leaders of tomorrow with his Solar PV study startup

abhimanyu
Rathore initiated his startup Solar Study aiming to impart quality solar PV education in India and forming Clean Energy Leaders of tomorrow.

With the world falling apart due to years of nature disruption caused by humanity for decades, renewable energy or clean energy is the only source of energy that can help us fulfill our endeavors in the age of climate change. Solar power in India is one of the fastest developing industries with the country’s solar installed capacity reaching 21.101 GW as of 30th September 2019, according to reports.

The sad reality of solar & PV industry in India

The people working in the solar & PV industry in India, however, have been very ignorant towards the potential of Solar PV as a future energy source for our country, according to Abhimanyu Singh Rathore, the founder of startup Solar Study. What frustrated him the most was knowing how everyone was not willing to improve the overall quality of the PV Installation in India. Rathore, hailing from the state of Rajasthan, understands that switching to renewable energy sources as an action to fight climate change is an expensive alternative for India being a price-sensitive market. The purchasing behavior to buy a Solar PV in India can be compared to purchasing any cheaper China-made entertainment gadgets, forming a thin line of difference between price & quality of the system.

And thus, intending to develop innovative technology in India which are better efficient in the same or lower cost as compared to our Chinese counterpart, Rathore, an RTU graduate, initiated the Solar Study Fellowship Program. The program provides the fellows with all the necessary knowledge support as well as from giving a dedicated mentor to them to help scale the technical and market knowledge in real-time.

Empowering quality learning

The Solar Study Fellowship program, registered under the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners, Photovoltaic Associate program, brings 50 bright individuals across the country under one roof that and spans as a Solar PV (Photovoltaic) program covering various aspects such as PV application, Sales-Economics, Design-Simulation, Installation, Maintenance & Operation. The startup, recognized by Startup India, aims to create prominent young leaders in clean energy through the program guided by experts in the field.

Solar Study, founded on 11th June 2019, also has its own Clean Energy Media, which is dedicated to the audiences and marketers seeking specific knowledge in Clean Energy space worldwide and wanting to target the particular audience to sell or promote their businesses or social initiatives.

Abhimanyu has been operating his company online from his paternal village and considers it his best decision.

“People have this common mindset to operate their startups from Metro cities ignoring their very targeted audience, and increasing their operational costs when their startups are not generating that much revenue per month and as a result, the majority of them fail in their initial years. I believed in working passionately, and it is not subjected to the geography from where I am operating it, and it majorly suits my startups targeted audience as majority of them interacts through the business via several online medium,”

says Rathore.

Startup’s reach

Rathore has also published books, including his 2017 fiction novel ‘Life at 23: A count from Highway Engineering Colleges’ and numerous scientific research papers on Spacecraft propulsion through Solar radiation. Currently, the company will be commencing its first batch of Solar Study Fellowship in December 2019 and has over 25+ finalists coming across India, Nepal, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, representing various institutions like IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Ropar, NIT-Trichy, UC Berkley, etc. multiple startups like Unergia, Cydeetech, Fishy Farmers representing world-renowned bodies like UN Development Program, and many more.

Rathore had to face multiple problems in the operation of his startup and worked rigorously to solve them on a daily basis. Fake and low-quality training in PV technology in India for the past 7-8 years has caused people to be reluctant to learn PV tech from a training institute and instead rely on learning via experiments on their first client site. This results in a lousy quality installation leading to declining credibility in a customer’s inclination to install a Solar PV.

He told TimesNext,

“So it is a chain of bad practices that have taken place and are prevalent in India’s most of the geographies, which have declined the credibility of Solar PV technology as a whole in India. So you can imagine ‘How big is this problem has become?’ and to tackle it we have to bring a change in mindset, and you can understand it equivalent to winning an election in the majority in India. We are trying our best to tackle all of these practices in a time span of the next three years at a larger scale.”

Vision & goals

The company has worked with IIT Bombay in the past to train over 3000+ beneficiaries in Solar PV tech and will also be collaborating as an Action partner for UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Rathore’s firm has been currently growing 30% organic traffic MoM and is looking for investments at the same point.

Rathore wants to see both their solutions & initiatives, prevalent in various geographies in India and across the globe, to serve their purposes efficiently. He strives to target around 500+ fellows to be trained as Clean Energy Leaders in the coming three years with approximately 50,000+ members on the Clean energy Media platform.

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