Dr. H. N. Sharan

Dr. Sharan during the period 1974-1979 became Director Engineering of BHEL that Dr. Sharan’s commitment to renewable energy for rural development began. 17 years were spent by him with Sulzer Brothers, Switzerland. As manager R&D, he managed technology transfer and co-operation with the licensees, had a large number of patents to his credit and published a large number of technical papers in international journals. He was invited by the Government of India to come back and participate in the restructuring of BHEL. At BHEL, he was responsible for setting up a comprehensive in-house base for engineering, design and R&D for all the products supplied by BHEL to the power sector Dr. Sharan strategised and supervised major RD&D projects such as solar heating systems in Hardwar, a 10 kW solar thermal power plant built at IIT, Chennai, and pilot plants for the development of coal gasification in Tiruchy and Hyderabad. He was a member on several national level policy making bodies and committees of Government of India and co-ordinated international energy cooperation programs with Germany, USA and USSR. He was one of the founder directors of NTPC and was on the board of several other technology organisations. Dr. Sharan, jointly with Dr. Jhirad of Rockefeller Foundation, conceptualised the SPEED program which is helping to integrate telecom towers as an anchor load in villages and can accelerate the process of large scale replication of the integrated model. Dr. Sharan is now working to make the case for the creation of a Decentralsied Energy Sector which, working in parallel with the Centralised Sector, should take the responsibility for integrated energy supplies and services in villages. He graduated in 1953 and went to Manchester University where he completed his Ph.D. in 1957.