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In India's mining belt, women spark hope with solar lamps

This photograph taken on October 8, 2025 shows Santosh Devi putting a light bulb at her house in Rajasthan's Beawar district. [AFP]

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.

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