#Watch #Chaudhry #Solar #foryou: Hotwiring rural Punjab

This is the part of Pakistan’s solar revolution that didn’t make it to international headlines.

Muhammad Nazam pulls his smartphone from his kurta pocket, opens the YouTube app and plays a tutorial. “It’s not that difficult, you know,” he says. “It’s just two wires: one is hot, and one is cold.” That’s how he installed solar panels a year ago for his tubewell in Qila Mian Singh, Punjab.

His neighbour Salim Mehr, clarifies, “When it’s installed, then everyone gets the experience. Everyone knows which wire is which, which button to press, how much to run it on, how many units are showing up, how much electricity there is.”

This is the part of Pakistan’s solar revolution that didn’t make it to international headlines. News feature after feature marvelled at an energy transition motivated less by climate worries and more by the state’s persistent inability to provide electricity people could rely on and afford. (China’s untrammelled ability to provide cheap imports was a decisive factor.) It made sense that rich city households were rigging up, but what was driving the wildfire uptake across the countryside where, according to thinktank Ember Energy, 73 per cent of panel owners are now located.

Turns out there are two unexpected mechanisms at work: the effect of seeing a Chaudary install it and the ease of figuring out how to do it. Muhammad Imran and Muhammad Rizwan, for example, living half a province away from each other, had identical experiences with their solar PV installation. They asked the shopkeeper how to do it, watched a couple of TikTok videos, and did it themselves within an hour. All Obaid Ullah needed was TikTok to set up his single panel at his kiryana or corner shop. “It’s not a problem,” he says. “It’s very easy.” The panel, which is propped up with a stick, now powers a small cooler at his store.

Spending several months across the rural countryside in Punjab, Zainaab spotted solar panels propped up on bamboo sticks, lying down amidst wheatfields, and spoke to people who brought them there. Travel for this research involved eight districts split evenly between North and South Punjab. She interviewed thirty-four people, mostly rural residents, especially large-scale (landlords) and small-scale (tenant and self-owned) farmers. She also spoke with solar panel importers and distributors, members of the Ministry of Energy and the Prime Minister’s Solarisation Committee.

The research confirmed many prior insights, including, most prominently, the breakdown in trust in the state’s ability to fix the electricity grid and the resulting death spiral from utility bills. But two other findings stand out: the demonstration effect of rich landlords installing solar on their land and the ease with which such panels can be installed using social media. Even though they are critically influencing the rural uptake of solar, both dimensions have been curiously underexplored.

Landlords as brokers

Most new technologies find their first wave of adopters in well-off urban dwellers. Those with high rates of education, mobility, and wealth have both the knowledge of new technologies and the financial bandwidth to adopt them. For Pakistan, this meant that solarisation’s initial home was in the DHAs and Bahria Towns of the country. The residential make-up of these housing societies includes a cross-section of Pakistan’s elite, a central faction of which is the traditional landlord. These are families that have historically owned large swathes of cultivated land, and their incomes primarily come from the rents they accrue from large-scale farming in these rural areas, where they employ labourers, rent land to tenants and still maintain kinship ties.

As part of the elite, they were also participants in the first wave of early adopters; many of them bought solar PV systems for their residential properties in Lahore, Multan and other urban centers. Some of these installations were well before solar prices had fallen to the level they have now. Anees Khawaja, a textile business tycoon and landlord based in Multan, first installed a 22-kW system in 2010, when, “it was the costliest solar. As well as the most inefficient…[but] Every year when we grow into solar, we get a better option available. So, this is here to stay.” Muhammad Mujahid, CEO of Innovo Corporation (which distributes several major solar panel brands across Pakistan), also identified landlords as the “first movers” with a “herd behaviour” following.

What sets these landlords apart from the rest of the affluent class is their spatial fluidity between rural and urban areas. Aided by improved roads and communication infrastructure in Punjab, their economic, social and political bases transcend the urban-rural divide. Mohsin Iqbal, owner of Sharifabad farm in Okara, maintains a permanent family residence in Lahore but regularly commutes to Sharifabad. This is common practice for landowning families who travel frequently to rural areas where they maintain kinship and patronage ties through baradari networks and agricultural holdings. After having adopted solar in their urban houses and finding it cost-effective, the natural next step was to ease the financial burden everywhere, including in their rural farms served by diesel-powered tubewells. This meant bringing the physical solar panel and accompanying technical know-how to farms and villages before it had even fully permeated through the various class strata in large cities. In this way, these landlords became the unexpected agents of technology diffusion in rural areas.

Mohsin Iqbal followed the same trajectory. His son Abdullah convinced him to install solar panels in their house in Model Town, Lahore. The system slashed their bills in half, which prompted them to solarise Sharifabad’s infrastructure too. The Iqbals had always provided free housing to labourers on their farm. Now, this now comes with free electricity too, as all the rooms are solarized. This has led to an influx of families converging on the 2,100 acre farm. Shahida’s family is one of them. She moved from nearby Dipalpur to the Iqbal farm. She has never been more than an hour’s journey away from her village but does not see solar PV (photovoltaic) as an alien technology but a fundamental part of her understanding of life and work.

Solar adoption by landlords had a powerful demonstration effect on surrounding poorer communities, who were now exposed to a purportedly transformative technology at the very moment they needed an off-ramp from grid and diesel-based electricity. This exposure came through the most trusted channel possible: a kinship network whose members had already seen the technology work and could vouch for its benefits firsthand. Both information and demonstration effects were thus in play. Farmers heard it was beneficial and saw the proof themselves.

Solar distributors are well aware of this phenomenon. Farukh Gilani, a Lahore-based distributor, put it bluntly: “A ‘shehri babu’ [city boss] can’t impress them [farmers]… they will not trust you. They will only trust the people in their locality, even if they are wrong, so if landlords do it, they do it; otherwise, no.” He was right. Every small-scale and tenant farmer interviewed had travelled somewhere to see the panels and check their efficacy before buying their own. Muntazar Mehdi from Kundal Khokhran explained: “Some people a bit far away had installed it too… I went there and saw it. They told me that it was a very good job… So, I saw it and came here and installed it too.” In the village of Moazam Makhdum, Khadam Hussain said, “I saw that everyone around me had installed it. All their bills were forgiven.” This process was witnessed firsthand during the interviews, when Mohsin Iqbal stepped away to explain how solar works to a spectating labourer who then said he was considering installing solar PV in his own home.

For a small minority of tenant farmers, their landlords simply gifted them solar panels. These are cases of ‘paternalistic adoption’ where richer residents financially support poorer kin and tenants purchase assets, which solar panels are now seen as. Ghulam Fareed, who rents five and a half acres of land in Muzaffargarh, said his landowners bought him eight solar panels six months ago. They showed up with the panels, lay them on the ground and said, “it’s for our ease. It will be for the water, they said,” and taught him how to connect them to his tubewell. The gift came with no strings attached as his rent has remained stagnant. He now sleeps in a straw shed beside the panels to guard them from thieves.

Muzamil from Garhmor had a similar experience, stating, “No, we didn’t install it. The chaudary [landowner] installed it. It’s his land. He just saw the system and saw it works well…He installed it in his home too.” Husain Shayq, Washington Post’s Pakistan correspondent, did not find this pattern surprising. In his story on the solar-powered transformation of Dhaku, a village in East Punjab, he noted that many interviewees were donating panels to poorer neighbours, explaining how, “The important thing was that the landlords or comparatively well-off people were willing to help by giving small loans to other[s], whatever they can do… maybe it’s part of their customs, their traditions.“ When pressed further, donors such as Anees Khawaja and Mohsin Iqbal both insisted that this was simply the gracious thing to do. Landlords, it seems, have played an unexpectedly critical role in facilitating wider solar adoption in rural Punjab.

Solar and social media

As solar adoption gained pace, so, too, did solar’s social media presence. YouTube and TikTok are replete with thousands of videos that provide information on brands, determining the size of the system one may need, and, most significantly, step-by-step guides to connecting panels to existing wiring, setting up their elevated structures and maintaining their efficacy. These are all in local languages like Urdu and Punjabi, and receive millions of views. Distributors like Farukh Gilani and Malik Waheed, based in Multan, create some of this content as advertising for their distribution companies. An example is Kamal Solar House, a distributor based in Multan, which has 122,000 followers on TikTok and posts content explaining different solar options almost daily.

However, the majority of this content comes from electricians who post installation and maintenance tutorials. Usman Jutt Technical is one of these electricians, who has posted multiple series of step-by-step videos teaching solar panel installation in Punjabi on TikTok. This channel has 201,800 followers, and its last three videos have a combined viewership of 10.5 million views. These creators are based all over the country. AJ Electric on YouTube posted a tutorial installing a 6kW solar system in Taxila which amassed 800,000 views. Moreover, a Pakistan-based channel called Solar Power Easy Tutorials Hindi Urdu has gained over 30 million views and 261,000 followers. There is thus a thriving community of creators who actively disseminate this information.

Viewers of this content are diverse. The audience includes everyone from solar customers to rural electricians. “Every single electrician has become a solar installer,” said a major energy company’s CEO in an interview, essentially proposing that an entire class of technical experts has trained itself online. His proposal was validated by the interviewees too, almost all of whom (barring those who hadn’t installed it themselves) had employed local electricians to do it for them. Sabir Ali’s installation in Kundal Khokhran was done by “boys from the village” who had learnt how to do it online. Not only is there an abundance of local installers, but the democratization of solar has allowed consumers like Muhammad Nazam and Muhammad Rizwan to become installers themselves, further reducing the financial load of moving to solar.

These videos are instructive for another reason. Produced by local people in local languages, they breed a comfortable familiarity with a technology that might otherwise feel alien. Access to a smartphone and the internet has effectively collapsed the distance between a technical expert and a small-scale farmer based in Kundal Khokhran, Muzzafargarh or Layyah, helping solar spread at an exponential rate.

Therefore, while a landlord makes the benefits of solar technology visible, social media is what makes it usable. In the absence of formal training programs or even a consistent roll-out model from the state, the supply chain for this technology has organized itself into a contained, self-sufficient institution that can effectively localise this frontier technology. Farmers first see a neighbour’s tubewell running on solar and learn to trust that it works. They can then go home, pull out a smartphone and learn how to reproduce it. The offline and online networks reinforce one another. Each new installation becomes both proof for the next potential adopter and another site from which technical knowledge can spread.

Solar has been truly life changing for many in rural Pakistan. Several respondents interviewed for this research had gone hungry to save money for electricity bills. They now call solar “God’s blessing”. The widespread adoption of solar in rural areas offers many lessons, foremost among them the power of informal networks and social media. These have allowed communities to organise so efficiently that getting an advanced technology like solar PV from a factory in China to a two-acre farm in Punjab is now, simply, a game of two wires.

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All photos by authors