Bhaskar: Innovation that glows beyond the grid

April 23, 2025 Innovation Valli Sarvani

In a world obsessed with scale, speed, and spectacle, true innovation often arrives in quieter forms, humble, human, and deeply rooted in need.

Bhaskar, a solar-powered lantern born in the heart of rural India, is one such innovation. It doesn’t power cities, but powers possibilities.

Bhaskar is not special because of its high-tech features. Its real strength is in how well it works in the real world.

It helps in places where electricity is not always available. It’s useful where repair shops are hard to find.

Even a few hours of light from it can change someone’s day, or even their future. It’s not just another product. It’s problem-solving with empathy.

Designed by Deepali Dhande and brought to life by her husband, Sachin Dhande, Bhaskar is the result of lived experience turned into inventive action.

The couple didn’t start with a lab. They began with a question: How do we make sure no child studies under a toxic kerosene flame again?

The answer wasn’t just “make it solar.” It was: make it tough enough for the fields, simple enough for a child to use, and repairable without a technician.

That meant zero wiring, intuitive operation, and rugged design. Innovation here meant resisting complexity, streamlining it so that a grandmother or a schoolchild could operate and fix it.

But the real leap came with the idea of Bhaskar ATMs, not banking machines, but lantern-repair hubs run by local entrepreneurs trained to service Bhaskars in their communities.

This flipped the idea of post-sale service into a decentralised, dignity-based ecosystem.

When your product builds micro-economies around itself, you know it’s not just solving a problem, it’s transforming a system.

Today, over 30,000 Bhaskars beam quietly across Indian villages, each one a small beacon of what design thinking can do when it listens more and assumes less.

In the dusty corners of homes, in the hands of farmers and students, Bhaskar proves that real innovation isn’t always disruptive; sometimes, it’s right-sized.

Bhaskar doesn’t just bring light. It brings agency. And in the realm of innovation, that may be the brightest idea of all.

Image from Pxhere (Free for commercial use / CC0 Public Domain)

Image Published on January 31, 2017