Reliable power, built for the hardest terrain — solar arrays and a communication tower at dawn.
For much of the past two decades, more than half of Afghanistan’s population lived without dependable electricity. Grid infrastructure thinned to almost nothing beyond the cities, and in the provinces even basic connectivity depended on whatever power could be generated on site.
Into that gap stepped an Indian power-solutions company, Su-Kam, which took on one of the more demanding infrastructure mandates of its kind: solar systems for wireless communication towers across seventeen provinces. The work was delivered on a full turnkey basis — design, equipment, installation and commissioning — and completed in roughly nine months, an unusual pace for a project of that scale and location.
The engineering was deliberately conservative. Each site paired solar arrays and battery storage with a diesel generator as backup, so connectivity would hold through extended cloudy spells — fifteen sites built for three days of autonomous power, two for five.
A hybrid by design: solar first, battery through the night, diesel only as a last resort.
The same approach was extended to a far larger rural-electrification effort aimed at two hundred districts, where compact two-kilowatt solar units brought light and power to households and community facilities. Around thirty districts were completed before the wider rollout paused.
For the company’s founder, Kunwer Sachdev, the Afghan chapter was among the most difficult the business ever undertook — a market that tested logistics, patience and resolve in ways more settled geographies never did. He has said little about it publicly, and perhaps for good reason: the value of the work lay less in the telling than in what it quietly enabled. Towers that stayed on. Clinics that could keep vaccines cold. Districts that, for the first time, had power that did not depend on a fuel truck arriving.
It is, in the end, an engineer’s story more than a political one — a record of reliable systems delivered where reliability was hardest to guarantee, by a company willing to go where few others would.
It was one chapter in a much longer arc. The same playbook — go to the hard markets, build for local conditions, earn trust through reliability — carried Su-Kam across more than seventy countries. That wider journey is told in 71 Countries, Built on Personal Courage.
Documented in industry coverage of the period, including Electronics Maker, and referenced among Su-Kam’s key export markets on Wikipedia.