Explained: How solar-powered pumps are changing lives of farmers

Business Standard travelled across four water-deficient districts in Rajasthan and Haryana to take stock of how solar-powered pumps are changing lives. The first of a three-part series

For Jagdish Prasad Yadav, 45, the sun never sets. Only one of three brothers to stick to farming, he works hard to make his 4.5-hectare land productive year-round. A keen learner of new agricultural practices, he is a regular at meetings of farmers.
 
“Let me click a selfie of all of us. I will put it on our farmer WhatsApp group and tell them about your visit,” he exuberantly says while coming out of his polyhouse where he grows hybrid cucumber, often referred to as ‘Chinese kheera’ by city vendors. Two harvests of the salad vegetable from the 0.4-ha polyhouse gives him Rs 16 lakh. Rajasthan gives 70 per cent subsidy for setting up polyhouses, provided the farmer follows micro irrigation methods across his entire holding. This entails building ponds for collecting rainwater if the holding is above half a hectare, for which a separate subsidy is given, apart from using sprinklers, drip irrigation, mulching and tunnelling. Micro irrigation is also a requirement for getting the subsidy.
 
Yadav of Itawa Bhopji village in Chomu tehsil of Jaipur district, is a model farmer, who has taken the benefits of schemes to increase his farm yields. He has one suggestion: “The government should allow me to use the three-phase power connection that I have from the solar water irrigation pump to also draw power for the household, by permitting conversion to single-phase as well. This will help to bring down my home power bill.”
 
Rajasthan has 44,242 solar power irrigation pumps installed; Haryana has 3,542. Both have high solar radiation and have been giving subsidies for such pumps, provided they do not also have grid connections for irrigation. To get around this, however, farmers take solar connections in the name of kin without these connections.
 
For Ram Prasad, 81, of Deroli Ahir village in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district that borders Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu, there are some basic challenges. For instance, he has to sleep beneath the solar plates installed in his farm, to prevent theft. Unlike Rajasthan, where most farmers have houses inside their fields and solar installations are nearby, houses are far from farms in Mahendragarh. “Could you ask the power department to allow installation of these plates on rooftops? It will save loss caused by wandering animals and thieves,” Prasad, who is hard of hearing, tells this correspondent, while shivering in the unusually cold December. Under Haryana government guidelines, off-grid solar water pumping systems are provided to farmers, gaushalas (cow sheds), water user associations and community or cluster-based irrigation systems at 75 per cent subsidy (inclusive of both state and central allocations).
 
The schemes
 
The Centre’s soon to be launched PM KUSUM (Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evem Utthan Mahabhiyan) scheme lays emphasis on promoting solar-powered irrigation in areas where feeders supplying power from the grid have been segregated, based on agriculture and non-agriculture load.
 
However, distribution companies in most of Haryana and Rajasthan differentiate between electricity uses in rural areas, through three-phase and single-phase connections. “We call it virtual segregation. For three-phase connections, we give power for six hours in the day or nine hours at night. For single-phase, we try to give power all day long. This saves the cost of separating feeders,” says Kunji Lal Meena, principal secretary (power) in the Rajasthan government.  The state has a target of 1,300 feeders under the UDAY programme. It has met about 90 per cent of this target.
 
The KUSUM programme has three components — decentralised renewable energy (RE) plants, solar agricultural water pumps, and solarisation of existing grid-connected agricultural pumps. Under Component A, 10,000 Mw of decentralised ground or stilt mounted and grid-connected solar or other RE-based power plants are to be set up. Component B involves installation of 1.75 million standalone solar agriculture pumps and Component C is for solarisation of a million grid-connected agriculture pumps. While Component B will be fully implemented, with total central support of Rs 19,036 crore, A and C have to first be run on an experimental basis, after which the total central support will be Rs 15,385.5 crore. The three components are targeting 25,750 Mw capacity by 2022.

Jagdish Prasad Yadav of Itawa Bhopji village in Jaipur takes the benefits of schemes to raise yields

 
States
 
The five states of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra have proceeded to get demand applications from developers under Component A. Rajasthan, in fact, is finalising a rate of Rs 3.14 a unit (kilowatt/hour) at which the state’s distribution companies (discoms) will buy power from decentralised units, while Rs 3.44 is likely to be the rate under Component C, where extra power from solarised pumps will be bought by the discoms. Haryana is following a different system. Two power feeders have been installed in Yamunagar and Karnal districts, to take in power from farmers under Component C of KUSUM, says T C Gupta, the government’s additional chief secretary (power).
 
The state has invested Rs 225 crore in installing solar-powered pumps, ownership of which will remain with Haryana Renewable Energy Development Authority or state discoms for the initial five years. “Farmers will be paid for the surplus power injected into the grid at Rs 1 a unit,” says Gupta.

Though the launch of KUSUM has been delayed after the Union Cabinet’s approval in July 2019, Energy Efficiency Services Ltd recently finalised a list of pumpset suppliers for five national zones through a bulk tender. Within a fortnight, formal launch of the programme from Haryana is likely, setting the sun rolling for many more like Yadav and Prasad who want to harness RE for a better harvest.