Cow dung as a charger? Yes. For, isn’t necessity the mother of inventions? At least it was for student-teacher duo, Niruttam Kumar Singh and Harvansh Yadav from the village Gangagarh in district Bulandshaher of Uttar Pradesh, India.Gangagarh gets power for barely five hours every day making people’s life miserable. Students can’t study, farms can’t be irrigated and women face difficulties in doing their chores and gadgets like radio and television don’t work. Three years ago the teacher Harvansh Yadav and the student Niruttam Kumar decided to do something about it. They knew that cow dung produces bio-gas and bio-gas, electricity.They took cow-dung in a plastic container and placed two discharged old batteries in it.They charged the cow-dung with salt water. The positive and negative charges thus produced were collected in the batteries. The batteries, interconnected in series, successfully produced electric current. The duo was thrilled.The people of village Gangagarh, at first curious and skeptical were soon convinced. They became happy when they saw that with this simple innovation they could light bulbs, listen to the radio and even charge mobile phones. Each unit of this innovation produces 1.5 volts of electricity. The cow-dung can last for about 45 days after which it needs to be changed. If more efficiency is required, one can use sulphuric acid in place of the salt-water.However, the invention of these two rural scientists is not complete because cow-dung stinks and they prefer to get electricity without a fowl smell. They are trying to improve the design. May be by using cow-urine. About 250 households in Gangagarh and several more in neighbouring villages of Kamonah, Jinamai and Rasoolgarh have started using this device and the Gujarat University is planning to use it to put a mobile phone charging unit in its campus.