Project GANESHA is a live demonstration of how scalable technology, local knowledge, and practical engineering come together to deliver lasting change. In rural Nepal, where energy access is limited and transport infrastructure fragmented, GANESHA is building a new model for electric transport and home energy — modular, mobile, and designed for long-term resilience.

Led by Global Solutions and delivered in partnership with P.A.K Engineering, NEVI, and 3 Sisters, Project GANESHA is being tested across two pilot regions selected for their different needs and conditions:

Each pilot area presents unique terrain, infrastructure limitations, and community structures, making it ideal for developing a system that can scale across Nepal and beyond. In Project GANESHA, we’re focusing on the mountainous regions of Dhading and, in Bardiya, the lowland plains (Tarai) with national park terrain. Both locations are challenging to access, which helps ensure the solutions we design are resilient and widely applicable.

Listening Comes First

Before designing any systems, the team focused on listening. Field visits were conducted across all three regions, engaging local stakeholders, including deputy mayors, ward chairs, women’s leaders, community forest officials, and education departments.

A detailed physical survey was designed to uncover how people live, move, and access power. The questions explored:

• Who lives in each community, and how decisions are made
• How far people travel to reach markets and essential services
• What energy sources are used, and how often they fail
• What kind of support (if any) has been received from governments or NGOs
• How aware people are of renewables and conservation efforts
• How gender roles and social structures affect access and inclusion

This is the essential blueprint. Every step that followed has been built from these lived experiences.

From Insight to Innovation

As insights emerged from the field, the technical team engineered a modular battery system designed for off-grid operation and rural terrain. These systems are used to power:

• EV-Rickshaws — compact, affordable electric vehicles for short trips between villages and towns, powered by fast-charging solar stations.
• Home Energy Systems — providing reliable power for small devices, TVs, fans, and, in the future, clean cooking systems.

At the core is Project GANESHA’s lightweight battery thermal management system, built for extreme environmental conditions. The advanced packs feature:

Integrated power electronics enabling local maintenance, repair, and system control

Cell-level thermal management through innovative heat exchangers linked to a manifold flow

Robust casing for durability in harsh terrain

Dhading: Pilot Site One

Dhading became the first live test site — a working example of how GANESHA’s systems deliver meaningful impact in a decentralised, mountainous rural environment.

The pilot includes:

• 100 mobile battery kits distributed to homes and small businesses
• Two solar-powered charging stations — one within the village, one roadside
• Two EV-Rickshaws are providing affordable public transport to nearby towns and schools, to improve the lives of locals and school children
• One off-road test vehicle to assess battery performance while accessing challenging terrain and system durability.
• 30 homes piloting battery-powered daily energy use with continuous community feedback

This is a fully deployed ecosystem, locally grounded and technologically future-ready.

Scenes from Dhading: homes, families, and education at the heart of Nepal’s first live pilot site, with a detailed timeline from January 2025 through to March 2026.

International Collaboration

This phase also marks the start of international collaboration, with knowledge sharing underway between GANESHA’s core team and other projects within the Energy Catalyst Programme, embedding gender equity, resilience, and development expertise into the next stage.

Phase 2: From Pilot to Scale

In Phase 2, Project GANESHA is transitioning from foundation to expansion, transforming field-tested systems into scalable, investable infrastructure. Building on the success of the initial pilot, this phase focuses on:

• Global market engagement
• Deeper technical integration
• Strategic partnerships to take GANESHA from rural Nepal to other regions that need it most

From Field to Global Opportunity

While Nepal remains the core, GANESHA’s systems — decentralised, solar-integrated, and designed for resilience — are proving relevant well beyond their original context.

The team is actively engaging with international networks, including:

• Energy Catalyst Accelerator Programme (via Carbon Trust)
• S-@ccess Forum, where battery assembly models for Africa, South America, and the South Pacific are generating significant interest
• Global green investment conferences, such as the Sankalp Bharat Summit in Varanasi, India (Nov 2024), focused on rural energy access and transport innovation
• Sankalp Bhahart Summit in Lucknow, India (11th & 12th Dec 2025)
• S-@ccess International Conference 2026 in Mallorca, Spain (8th – 10th April 2026), where we are looking forward to presenting two papers.

Each pathway represents a step toward localised manufacturing, investment mobilisation, and long-term sustainability — positioning GANESHA as a replicable model for diverse markets worldwide.

India Market Benchmarking: Battery Swap Systems at Scale

As GANESHA prepared to move from pilot to scale, the team looked outward, studying how other countries were already deploying electric mobility at speed. India became a natural reference point, prompting the team to study the Indian electric rickshaw market.

Across India, more than five million tuk-tuks form the backbone of daily transport.
By 2030, 80 per cent of all new vehicles in this category are expected to be electric, supported by national programmes such as FAME II and PM E-DRIVE.

That scale has created a battery-swapping market now worth more than USD 1.2 billion, with established operators including Sun Mobility, Battery Smart, RACE Energy, Lithion Power, and Esmito Solutions.

To understand what works and what still hinders wider adoption, Intellecap conducted a comparative benchmarking study under the Energy Catalyst Programme. Their analysis focused on how India’s systems operate commercially and what lessons could be applied to rural and off-grid contexts.

Three clear operating models emerged:
• Pay-per-swap
• Pay-per-kilometre (rental or subscription)
• Pay-per-kWh

These models have made urban swapping fast and affordable, but most remain tied to grid power, limiting reach in remote or low-infrastructure areas.

GANESHA builds on this foundation and extends it further.

By combining solar charging, thermally-cooled battery modules, and fast-swap off-grid capability, GANESHA takes a proven urban innovation and re-engineers it for rural use.

The result is a decentralised, zero-emission system designed to operate anywhere, independent of the grid, locally maintainable, and built for long-term community benefit.

In doing so, GANESHA turns global insight into practical engineering, transforming lessons from India’s high-volume market into a model that works where power lines end.

GEDSI in Practice

As Project GANESHA moves from field insights to live delivery, GEDSI is being applied as part of the project itself through local engagement, structured training, and measurable evaluation alongside the technical work.

This reflects a core principle of GANESHA: systems are more likely to succeed when they are shaped around how people live, participate, and access services in practice.

At Pilot Site 2 in Bardiya, this approach combined needs assessment with a participatory GEDSI workshop involving 21 participants.

Structured pre- and post-evaluations were used to measure changes in understanding and awareness, thereby creating comparable evidence for project learning and reporting. The results showed clear progress, with familiarity with Gender Equality improving from 7 to 21 participants, familiarity with Social Inclusion improving from 5 to 20, and awareness of GEDSI initiatives increasing from 5 participants to all 21 by the end of the session.

For GANESHA, this matters because inclusive delivery is not separate from successful delivery. It helps strengthen participation, improve local ownership, and support the long-term uptake of energy services as the project scales up.

You can read more here, in our full blog on the delivery of the GEDSI workshop.

From Technical Progress to Market Readiness

As Project GANESHA moves closer to live deployment, progress is being driven not only by engineering development in Nepal but also by the broader relationships and market conditions needed to support scale.

A recent programme visit across Nepal and India brought these strands together, connecting factory readiness, partner capability, monitoring systems, investor dialogue, and in-market engagement around the future of modular battery-supported mobility.

In Kathmandu, the focus was on translating design into delivery.

At the NEVI facility, the team reviewed battery assembly lines, EV rickshaw upgrade areas, cradle integration, testing zones, repair workflows, and resourcing plans with local partners.

The visit also confirmed training priorities, labour and tooling needs, and delivery schedules for batteries, cradles, and vehicle sequencing across both pilot sites.

Alongside this, technical sessions with EPT and PAK advanced battery and BMS monitoring, charging-rack electronics, fault review, and commissioning milestones, all essential to ensuring the system performs reliably once deployed.

From Kathmandu, that practical progress was then taken into India through Sankalp Bharat 2025 in Lucknow, where discussions moved from factory systems to the commercial and institutional pathways that enable rollout.

Meetings with the British High Commission explored how policy, trade, and city decarbonisation strategies could help support modular battery systems and EV rickshaws at scale, while engagement with Intellecap focused on delivery models, local manufacturing hubs, and EV rickshaw operating hubs that are investable, repeatable, and locally owned.

Wider conversations with organisations such as TERI helped position GANESHA within the broader clean-energy and mobility ecosystem, ensuring the project remains aligned with regional priorities and on-the-ground needs.

What this trip demonstrated is that GANESHA is advancing beyond a pilot technology. It is developing as a joined-up delivery model, one that brings together robust hardware, local implementation capability, monitoring and repair systems, and the stakeholder relationships required to support investment and scale.

That combination is what turns technical progress into market readiness and is central to the project’s long-term ambition in Nepal, India, and beyond.

Read more: What It Takes to Keep EV Rickshaws Moving

Development of the battery components is progressing, marking another important step in GANESHA’s delivery pathway.

The team is planning a further visit to Kathmandu in May 2026, with additional updates to be shared as the next phase advances.

More to follow…