80-year-old corn-selling woman Selvamma gets tech help, makes job easy

Selvamma, 80, has been selling corn outside Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru for 18 years. An NGO gifted Selvamma, a portable solar-powered DC fan that has made her work easy. It is a solar-run adjustable DC fan with a lightweight lithium ion battery. The equipment is said to have helped Selvamma in saving coal consumption and also has reduced dust generation. The work that took 10 minutes while manually fanning the corn now takes just 5 minutes with this new equipment. Currently the cost of the solar-run fan is Rs 9,000 as it is a pilot project and is expected to go down to Rs 6,000 as production catches speed.