From prepaid phones to prepaid electricity: Yashraj Khaitan at TEDxGateway 2013

77 million households in India don't have access to a basic resource - electricity. Moreover, while supplying power to the remaining population, India's electricity distribution companies lose over $30 Billion annually primarily due to theft and pilferage. In his talk, Yashraj Khaitan will describe how the effective use of technology and innovative business models can reduce losses by an amount which can be used to electrify the entire nation within 3 years.


Yashraj Khaitan is the co-founder and CEO of Gram Power, an energy technology company out of University of California - Berkeley that is working on introducing a new paradigm of power distribution in rural India. Yashraj started working on Gram Power when he was 19 and prior to that worked on cutting edge solar cell research as a high school student. He completed his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California - Berkeley and then opted out of his post graduate program to work on Gram Power permanently.His main motivation to return to India: The great street food.