In Ladakh, bringing power to the people is complicated business – Cond Nast Traveller India – The Last Word in Travel

From the air, through the slightly hazy filter of the aircrafts windows, Ladakh looked like endless watercolours that refused to be framed by the horizon. On the ground, at 11,500ft above Mumbai, the painting was clearer but had acquired gentle waves, the mountains swaying slightly. Or it might have just been me feeling light-headed. Altitude does its mischief without delay. It takes about a day and a half to get used to. Our hotel was a short ride from the airport, and Jaideep Bansal, Chief Operating Officer of the Global Himalayan Expedition (GHE), was waiting at the lobby with a bottle of water with my name on it. Drink, he said, before I could say, Thank you, nice touch. I drank. And craving a hot Thukpa, I asked what was for lunch. Jaideep said the local food was unsuitable for visitors the moment they landed; it was very heavy. Lunch was paneer butter masala. Next followed briefings about the mission. The primary reason why 11 people from six countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the US state of Texas, which has its own flag) had decided to walk, work and pay for this mission was the idea that they would trek to a village that has never seen a lit light bulb, that cannot be accessed except on foot, and bring the villagers from darkness to light. Our village was deep in the Zanskar Valley. Without argument, one of the most beautiful places on Earth. The idea that once can do that much good while on what would otherwise be called a holiday is tremendously attractive. Even at 11 subscribers. Somehow, authors Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain both came to mind simultaneously as we headed west two days after landing.

Out of my window, the scenery moved by. I will leave all the purple prose that might otherwise have taken up space in the natural dyes of Roerichs paintings. But I will say this: you cant whizz past mountains. The scale is just too great. The mountains define the pace at which you pass them. All you can do is watchand close your mouth when its behind you. And open it again for the next one. And enjoy the journey with quiet gasps of breath. This is what was happening in our car. But in the trusted Tempo Traveller (otherwise known as the ass-breaker), things were a little different. I may have forgotten to mention this, but this expedition was targeted at future leaders, and the age spread was between 22 and 60-ish. Which is to say, one can never predict who our future leaders will be. At any rate, they were all in one tempo. And being asked, one by one, such questions as what is the boldest decision you have made?; what is your greatest success?; tell us about your greatest failure.

It was then, I suspect, that the mountains started speaking to me. I heard them slapping their icy palms against their foreheads and weeping dark mineral tears down their cheeks. They were quoting John McEnroe for some reason: You cannot be serious! (Alertspecifically, seniorreaders of this publication will remember the line call-challenging, profanity-spouting tennis genius of the 80s who immortalised the line.) In our car, theres some gasping, some exclamations, and some simpler questions: Man! Wow! See the colours there the shadows?

In the front seat, Paras Loomba, GHEs founder, allowed himself some ruminations. Already dabbling in homestays and astro-tourism (Ladakh has the clearest skies imaginable), he was now thinking of promoting marathons between two points in the Zanskar Valley. I did a quick calculation and suggested to Paras that the route here was good for two marathons and not just one: start one at either end, so the contestants collide at the finishing line in the middle

We arrived in Kargil, palpably different from Leh. The two always were, but the war in 1999 invested Kargil with a special tension

We arrived in Kargil, palpably different from Leh. The two always were, but the war in 1999 invested Kargil with a special tension

Stanzin Jigmet, a talented photographer from Mulbekh, a town close to Kargil and to bizarre moon-like landscapes that hypnotise tourists, was in the car with us. It was his job to document our expedition, and he was armed with a DSLR and a drone. Jigmet, who had so far been quiet, suddenly said: And we could send the drone up when they collide. The car shook with collective laughter, and it seemed to me that the mountains were speaking to Jigmet, as well. We arrived in Kargil, palpably different from Leh. The two always were, but the war in 1999 invested Kargil with a special tension and a lot more military. Tension that the sudden change of its status, to be part of the Union Territory of Ladakh rather than a district in Jammu and Kashmir earlier in the week of our journey, had exacerbated.

Independent Ladakh became a part of India in an unusual series of circumstances in the mid 19th century. The region was first overrun by vassals of Ranjit Singhs Sikh state. But in a matter of only a decade, the Sikhsand all their territory, including Ladakhwere under the British crown and then India in 1947. Although it was in 1962, when the Chinese bit off Aksai Chin to the east, that Ladakh was cut off both economically and spiritually.

The ancient trade route to Central Asia was gone, as was access to the Buddhist learning centres of Tibet. Ironically, it took a foreign invasion to glue Ladakh to India. However, a chunk of Ladakh, Kargil, is primarily Shia, which is why you see portraits of the Ayatollah on the walls of shops and eateries almost the moment you enter the district. Its also why its population has a historically uneasy relationship with the Sunni-backed separatists of Srinagar. (Think Iran vs Saudi Arabia)

For the Dalai Lamas photographs to reappear, you need to reach the Buddhist Zanskar Valley. The differences are visual: the onion domes and spires of mosques give way to the cubist lines of gompas; the maroon and yellow of robes replace the greens of flags and signage against the cold desert landscape. The Buddhists and Muslims of this region have coexisted separately (the traditionalists dont eat together) but peacefully over nearly a thousand years. Their food, of course, is different. Having been denied my thukpa in Leh, I was looking forward to a taste of balti, the aroma of which is all over Kargil.

The chef asked me for a review of his version of the dish. I told him it was missing some opium.

The chef asked me for a review of his version of the dish. I told him it was missing some opium.

That evening, I inspected the hotel buffet. And one dish stood out: Chicken Khurana. Bemused, I walked up to the chef and asked, Who is this Khurana? Is he local? The chef allowed himself an uncomfortable laugh. Heh, heh, its a special recipe from a film. One of the future leaders at my table told me there was indeed a film called Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, in which a dhaba owner dies out of the blue without revealing the secret recipe of his establishments signature dish. The predictable comic search follows, until someone accidentally drops a bit of the late patriarchs opium stash into the pot. And everybody is addicted to Chicken Khurana again. The chef asked me for a review of his version of the dish. I told him it was missing some opium.

After an early start the next morning, we stopped for a snack. What sandwiches are these? a participant asked. In a trance, I merely relayed what the mountain had just whispered to me: Sandwich a la Saklecha. Our destination was Tangtse, and it would take the better part of three days to get to it. While our journey may have started in Leh, it had really begun months ago. The reason: Tenzin Chonjor, a wiry, ever-smiling young fellow from a one-house (his house) hamlet almost directly below the 2,500-year-old Phugtal Monastery. He was the one who surveyed villages that needed electrification.

It was also his job to get communities to agree to one of the key principles that GHE follows: tourists or corporates pay for the panels and microgrids GHE fixes, but the community is responsible for their maintenance. Each village must open a bank account and contribute Rs100 a month so the infrastructure isnt neglected. No account, no panels. Chonjor is particularly suited to this job because of his other professionhe is also this vast valleys postman. He makes his collection trips once a week and ties up with a counterpart who comes from Leh. In the winter, this drops to once a month or less, and he must trek across the chadar, as the ice sheets of frozen rivers are known. His job is slightly easier, he says, than his colleagues: While there are villages for shelter on my run, he has to spend nights in caves. When there are no letters, Chonjor writes to himself and picks up his mail from Padum, says Jigmet. Chonjor must cross landslides and passes and bridges that seem to be made of twigs. What if he fell, I ask him. That would be speed post is Jigmets response. The mountains were really speaking to him. We arrived, finally, in Tangtse, a cluster of around 20 homes spread across a couple of hamlets.

The next morning, Independence Day. A public holiday. But a working day for expeditioners. It was time for Shakir Hussain to take over. He was a man of clear thoughts, with no formal training as an electrician and a slightly incongruous fear for someone who works at an altitude. On many electrification jobs, he has had to cross rickety, high-slung bridges across rampant rivers, or carry equipment clinging to mountainsides, as hungry rocks waited below. I prefer to cross bridges at night, he said Why? Because you cant see in the dark. I have been terrified of heights since I was a child. As for his electrical work, hes so competent that he can do it with his eyes closed. He had done the wiring for the grids in advance. The future leaders (now temporary electricians) were divided into teams that would carry the solar panels to the roofs and do some of the fitting. Hussain laid out the equipment, bulbs, holders, wires, screws, pliers, hammers and other materials and reminded the participants sombrely that anything lost would mean darkness for the people they had come to help.

The teams got to work with enthusiasm. Competing against each other to get the job done. (Even I, who generally prefers to observe work rather than really do it, was ambushed into fixing a bulb holder, a task I performed quite artistically.) The expeditioners were extremely happy, their sense of accomplishment making their sweat glisten. I mentioned Mark Twain earlier. Do you recall Tom Sawyer making his friends feel like it was a privilege to paint his fence? Delightful.

The solar microgrids set up in Tangtse mirror those GHE installed in other villages earlier. The panels soak up the sun, and 12-volt batteries allow seven (GHE-made) light bulbs and a few appliances to work for about 10 hours in a household. This may include four hours of televisiona limit built in by GHEif the villagers buy the ones it manufactured (Rs11,500 apiece). The TVs, like everything else, work on direct current. One reason to use DC (most modern appliances run on alternating current, as is the power in your home) is that there are fewer transmission losses. The other is that shocks are much milderbelow 48 volts. The downside: it cant be transmitted over long distances like AC can.

Here in Zanskar, DC could be the only option for basic needs. On the way to Tangtse, even in hamlets like Fotu Lalok right on the highway from Leh to Kargil, the high wires that serve army posts dont stoop to reach places like Nawangs tea stall, Enfield service station and homestay. The cost of drawing wires from the main grid to the spread-out villages of Ladakh, where most of its 3,00,000-odd population lives, is deemed too high. This is the power gap GHE aims to plug.

On our return journey to Leh, Loomba stopped and pointed to a pass in the mountains. It was that pass (Kongski La, 17,000ft) that he had been trying to cross six years ago with the help of a guide who was a certified mountaineer. It was night, and the mountaineer had surrendered his role to Loomba in despair. They had been looking for a village called Sumda Chenmoa village without electricity. What they had found was a couple of old herdsmen, huddled in a 4x4ft shanty, listening to a Chinese radio station (the only airwaves available). Shelter for the night was given and directions the next morning. Thats how I met (Tsering) Dorje. The men in the hut were his grandfather and a relative. Dorje was about to leave his village but stopped when I told him why I had come.

This was July 2013. Loomba came back the next month with modest solar lanterns. Soon after, with the cooperation of the local villagers, he and Dorje (a trained electrician) installed a solar microgrid. And with that, you could say, GHE was born. By the time this article is on the stands, the company will have covered 100 villages in the region. Along the way, GHE picked up a slew of international awards and a place at the table at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

That the story starts with the attempted distribution of a few solar lanterns is genuinely moving. That Dorje came on board and has played a major part in the near-100 projects since is equally touching. And a touching story is like the opium in the Chicken Khurana. It gets people hooked. Of the 11 participants on the expedition, four had crowdfunded their trip, and each had to tell their donors a story. In broad strokes, the stories were similar. Their underlying themes: they had been selected to be part of a future leaders expedition; the mission was to take a remote village from darkness to light; the inaccessibility of the village (non-motorable); and the lasting impact of their tripleaving behind a basic infrastructure facility that would be sustainable and green. The fourth is something that everyone agreed on after the expedition was completed. But Tangtse didnt fit the second two. Several of its homestays had power in the areas the host family used, even if erratically. One of the crowd-funders I spoke to said this was the first shock. Other participants were surprised but more tempered. Most of those who paid their own way said it didnt really matter.

But where did this light come from? The fact is that the faint government footprints, planted decades ago, could still be seen, though the story they told was a story of neglect. I asked Motup Tashi about this, the dish antennas and the cell phones that people possessed, toys that didnt work because there was no network. Tashi lives in a hamlet of Tangtse but attended a senior school in Delhi and then Ramjas College. He has a masters degree in environmental science. He told me he would study by kerosene lamp when he was four or five, but a couple of years after that, solar power came to his village. He is 27.

However, the power went off about a decade ago, and no one came to fix the lines. Winters became harder. And this is how GHE reinterprets its darkness to light pitch: the darkness of the winter is lit up by its bulbs. The presence of satellite TV dishes had puzzled the participants of the expedition on arrival. These were put up partly with the hope that the precarious power systems in some homes would work, so a subsistence diet of news and entertainment could be consumed. Now that they had a microgrid, Tashi said, his father had decided to invest in a GHE TV set. As for the cell phones, he laughed. Those had to be taken to Padum, the nearest town with mobile reception (70km away) where people could make calls and download stuff for the dreary wintermuch like the way they stored dried yak meat.

By taxi, it takes Rs600 to Rs700 to reach Padum from the village. Given the distance, you cant usually return the same day, so add a nights stay to the mix and you could be spending Rs2,000 to Rs3,000 just to make a phone call to find out the results of a job interview. In some ways, the Rs3,000 phone call tells the story of Zanskar being cut off better than the lack of a metalled road. Because these places are accessible by road. Not good ones, but roads. The joke in these parts is that its better to be close to Pakistan; you get good roads. Our journey back to Leh was bumpy but entirely motorable. The vehicles were parked at Tangtse all along.

As for the first theme, that of selection, participants told me there were a few calls that covered how they would pay (and some haggling), their general health and their overall interests. In short, it was if you pay, you go. But being selected works well for crowd-funders. The arbitrage comes from the vicarious gratification felt by donors who wished they had the time to invest in a fortnight of adventure and goodness. One of the participants, somewhat alarmed by the high cost of the journey, put together a generous estimate of his own: it worked out to about a thousand dollars less. Such a price would make a trip like this much more accessible to young Indian travellers. The main costs, of course, were the panels and personnel. The stay was inexpensive (shared tents and village homestays). As for the food, there were pancakes and pasta (nearly a local staple like Maggi) and one day, there was even a pizza. But where was the local food?

It was planned, the organisers said, for our last evening in Tangtsewhen the lights would be lit and there would be a celebration. That celebration never happened: there was just a simple ceremony at the village monastery. A little girl, all of three, who belonged to the village had passed away. And even though everyone had done their best to light Tangtse up that evening, it was this gloom that hung over all of us. GHE is an organisation that cant be slotted comfortably into a particular category. It isnt an NGO, but its work resembles that of one. GHE treks to where the government has only carelessly trodden. Its certainly not charitable, but in its communication, it attempts to foster the spirit of altruismin its clients, and their friends, and their friends.

On our last day, I find Loomba in the lobby of the Leh resort engaged in a webinar with participants of the next expedition. Amid talking about the mission, he says, We believe that people work best with their stomachs full, so we will have our own cooks you can even expect pizza. I was about to add and Chicken Khurana, but a wise mountain told me not to.

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In Ladakh, bringing power to the people is complicated business - Cond Nast Traveller India - The Last Word in Travel