The Hindu reports Su-Kam Sunway launch — a solar street light with a lithium-ion battery that needs no grid connection and keeps working through a blackout.
The Hindu reports the launch of Su-Kam Sunway — a solar street light with an integrated lithium-ion battery that eliminates the need to trench, cable and connect to the grid, and keeps working through outages. It is an unglamorous product with an outsized public-infrastructure implication, and Su-Kam founder Kunwer Sachdev uses the launch to argue that every street light in India should be solar.
A street light that does not need the grid
The core technical claim is straightforward. Sunway integrates a lithium-ion battery directly into the pole; there is no line back to the DISCOM, no cabling to lay, no meter to read. As Su-Kam release put it to The Hindu, the product “eliminates the need for expensive cabling, and keeps providing light even during a blackout while giving a zero power bill.”
Why lithium, not lead-acid
The Hindu flags why the switch matters. The Indian solar street-light industry, Su-Kam argued, had been held back by inefficient lead-acid battery designs — low cycle life, poor efficiency, and a maintenance burden that made municipalities regret the deployment. Lithium-ion changes the maths: longer life, lower service cost, and better performance in the temperature swings of an Indian summer.
“I think all the street lights in India should be solar-powered. India is blessed with good weather and abundant sunshine. But we realised that traditional solar street lights were inefficient, required high maintenance and were prone to battery thefts.”— Kunwer Sachdev, Managing Director, Su-Kam • The Hindu, 26 April 2016
The national context: SLNP 3.5 crore lamps
The Hindu places the launch against the government Street Light National Programme, launched in January 2015, which set out to replace 3.5 crore conventional street lights and save an estimated 9 billion units of electricity a year. As of the article, roughly 750,780 lights had been swapped, saving about 99 million units. Sunway pitch is that if that entire pipeline could migrate to off-grid solar, the savings compound — and no city has to keep paying to power its own lamps.
Made in India, six variants
Su-Kam told The Hindu the Sunway range is manufactured in India, coming in six models from 4W to 50W — enough spread to cover residential lanes, industrial complexes, campuses and highway lighting. Made-in-India was not a rhetorical flourish; for a public-procurement product like a street light, local manufacturing is often the practical difference between winning and losing a state tender.
Why the launch mattered
Read now, the Sunway launch is one of the earliest large-scale attempts to bring lithium-ion + solar together in Indian public infrastructure — the same pairing that today defines everything from rural micro-grids to EV charging. Sachdev pitch to The Hindu — that theft-prone, maintenance-heavy lead-acid solar had been giving the whole category a bad name — is now the industry consensus.