In a place where the sun sets at 5:30pm, that means the refugees ppr hot pipe for drinking water don’t have to eat their dinner in the dark, said the 30-year-old, who arrived in Bangladesh at the beginning of last month.At the entrance to the Balukhali camp, one of the ubiquitous blue panels powers Kabir Ahmed’s makeshift grocery store.The family left Rakhine in such a hurry they had to leave their 20-watt solar panel behind, but they have bought a bigger one in Bangladesh.Others have used their meagre resources to buy them after arriving in Bangladesh, where they have had to set up home in the overcrowded refugee camps near the border.But many villages in the isolated and under-developed northern part of Myanmar’s Rakhine state where the refugees have travelled from also lacked access to mains power.Kabir and his family recharge their phone batteries at a nearby market at a cost of 30 taka (36 US cents).
The panel is connected to a small battery powering a mobile charger and a small bedside light.The 46-year-old, who worked in a shrimp farm in his native Myanmar, set up his small business when he arrived in Bangladesh at the start of August after fleeing a military crackdown in Myanmar that the United Nations has said amounts to ethnic cleansing.A handful of power points in tents, served by long electricity cables, are available for the 582,000 Rohingya the UN estimates have arrived in Bangladesh since an upsurge in violence on August 25.But after barely an hour, the light goes out, plunging the tent once again into darkness."Now we can have light at night, and when it’s really hot the fan gives us a bit of relief," he said as he wiped the sweat from his body with a cloth.
Balukhali (Bangladesh): The squalid camps in Bangladesh that are now home to nearly 600,000 newly arrived Rohingya have no running water and barely any toilets, but they do have power – thanks to a proliferation of solar panels.In fact it is not just the Rohingya – 50% of the population of Myanmar lacks access to mains electricity.Some of the refugees say the panels were among the few precious possessions they grabbed as they fled villages in Myanmar that have been burned to the ground in a campaign of retribution following militant attacks on police posts.In the absence of mains electricity, the sun is a precious source of energy for the Rohingya now living in camps, where even food and clean water are hard to come by.Zoook has announced the launch of a new power bank, ZP-PB10DC with 10000mAh capacity.The power bank comes equipped with 2 amp output which is capable of charging phones as well as tablets.The company claims that the ZP-PB10DC’s high-efficiency conversion system improves the output conversion rate over 85 percent. It is compatible with all USB powered smartphones, tablets and also supports MP3/MP4, PSP, PDA, Bluetooth, Cell Phone, Digital Camera and MID. Currently, the device is unavailable at online channels. The power bank is currently available at offline mobile stores only at a price of Rs 999.