So far, two pilot rice husk generators are providing power to about 10,000 rural Indians, which will save 200 tonnes of emissions annually for each village if compared to generation of power from diesel or coal, the university said in a statement here.

The two students are Manoj Sinha and Charles Ransler, from the university's Darden School of Business and their partner is Gyanesh Pandey, an engineer who oversees things on the ground in India.

The project may help turn the huge piles of husks that accumulate in many "rice belt" villages into two valuable products: electricity and ash that can be sold as an ingredient for cement, the institute said.

The business plan of Husk Power Systems calls for a rapid expansion that will put the miniature power plants in hundreds more villages within a few years.

The plan recently received several votes of confidence as college business plan competitions have awarded it almost USD 100,000 in prize money, including USD 50,000 for winning the Social Innovation Competition at the University of Texas on May 2, USD 35,000 for second place at MIT's Ignite Clean Energy competition on May 12 and a USD 10,000 top prize from the University of Virginia on April 7. The idea for the rice husk generators was originally conceived by Sinha, who earned his engineering degree from the University of Massachusetts and holds 10 patents for work done at Intel, and Gyanesh Pandey, who left an engineering career in Los Angeles to return to India.

Sinha and Pandey went to college together in India and both hail from rural areas that struggle with a lack of electricity.

"We grew up in those areas. Our relatives still do not have electricity. We wanted to give back to those areas," Sinha said in the statement.

Originally they envisioned refining the generator concept and raising enough money to donate rice-husk generators for two or three villages near where they grew up, said Sinha.

At Darden, Sinha shared the idea with Ransler, who did a bit of research and soon suggested that the generators could be a financially viable business that could be expanded to hundreds of villages.