Santosh Devi is proud to have brought light -- and hope -- to her hamlet in western India, taking up solar engineering through a programme for women like her whose husbands suffer chronic disease from mining work.

Her husband is bedridden with silicosis, a respiratory illness caused by inhaling fine silica dust which is common across some 33,000 mines in Rajasthan state, where the couple and their four children live.

Santosh, 36, has joined seven other women for a three-month course at Barefoot College in Tilonia, a two-hour drive from her village in the desert state's Beawar district.

There, the group learned the basics of solar engineering -- installing panels, wiring them, and assembling and repairing lamps -- to help light up homes and provide electricity for anything from charging

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