“Bringing power to one and all”

A pre-paid model and wireless set-up has benefited OMC Power but on-ground execution remains a challenge.

In 2010, three former Ericsson employees teamed for a small and innovative, albeit challenging, business idea in an area where the government, with all its financial and managerial might, had failed for years. The trio planned to supply electricity to the unreachable – technically called off-grid consumers – in nondescript rural areas. Their aim was to replicate the telecom model, which had transformed the lives of millions in the hinterland through wireless mobile telephony, in the power sector.

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OMC wins 2013 Economic Times awards for Corporate Excellence

The renowned ET awards, organised by India’s leading business newspaper Economic Times, recognize outstanding Indian companies, leaders and entrepreneurs.

OMC’s Chairman Sushil Jiwarajka and Chief Operating Officer Rohit Chandra received the award at the ET Awards ceremony in Delhi earlier this month.

OMC was awarded in the category “Operational Excellence – Tower Development” for our pioneering work in green telecom power and community power.

“The Next Wireless Revolution, in Electricity”

Gaurav Gupta, the director for Asia of the development consulting firm Dalberg, tells a story about the untethered life. “You want to sit next to a beach and have a laptop on your lap, and you want to be connected to the world,” Gaurav says. “But you don’t want any wires.”

We go off the electrical and phone grids by choice, Gaurav says. We buy cellphones, install Wi-Fi, buy eco-friendly high-end camping stoves and water purifiers. But around the world, billions of people are off-grid by necessity: they live without wired electricity, piped gas and water, or sewers. The two worlds are linked. “What we want, they need,” he said in a TEDx talk in February in Mumbai. “There is huge innovation going on around the world to serve your needs because you want to play Angry Birds longer.”

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