In India’s mining belt, women spark hope with solar lamps

Santosh Devi is proud to have brought light — and hope — to her hamlet in western India, taking up solar engineering through a programme for women like her whose husbands suffer chronic disease from mining work.

Her husband is bedridden with silicosis, a respiratory illness caused by inhaling fine silica dust which is common across some 33,000 mines in Rajasthan state, where the couple and their four children live.