Solar powered irrigation can help small farmers grow crops during dry season and increase their incomes but the implementation of poor-friendly innovations is beset with behavioural, economic, technical and policy-related challenges.
As many as 83 percent (or about 15 crore) of all farm households in India belong to small and marginal farmers cultivating less than 1 hectare of land. Of them, a substantial percentage, possibly at least half that number, live in dominantly rainfed agricultural areas with limited access to irrigation. The principal constraint they face is absence of accessible water for cultivating crops in the dry season.
Farmers living in dryer parts in central, western and southern parts of the country witness emptying groundwater reserves and dwindling access to water. The small and marginal farmers living in the Ganga-Brahmputra-Meghna basin don’t have adequate devices to access the relatively abundant groundwater available there. For them, solar powered irrigation is a silver bullet that can almost completely solve their problem.
Yet, silver bullets are often off the business mark. Innovations that are poor friendly do not automatically spread or scale up. This is primarily due to behavioural, economic, technical and policy-related factors.
Here is an attempt to understand the issues that obstruct scaling up of solar powered irrigation to help small and marginal farmers grow crops during dry season and increase their incomes:
State governments are under pressure to provide free electricity to farmers for the purpose of irrigation, and they continue to make these offers despite mounting losses for power companies. Farmers outside the reach of the current grid as well as those who fall within the grid but do not have connections are lured by the promise of free power.
On the other hand, the incentives to people for installing their own solar power irrigation equipment are weak. This makes farmers aspire for grid power for farm electrification and reluctant to get their own solar schemes.
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This is despite the fact that the Indian government has a scheme named PM-KUSUM for encouraging farmers to install solar irrigation systems, implemented by the Renewable Energy Development Authority of the respective state governments. Thousands of group and individual schemes have been sanctioned under the scheme but the gap between the sanctioned and implemented projects is huge. A detailed assessment is warranted to understand why the gap is so large.
The main factors that adversely affect the implementation of large schemes are farmers seeing free unlimited power from the grid as an easier option, availability of land close to water, mobilisation of communities and ensuring smooth coordination of agencies for repair and management, etc.
The main issue with the scheme is that it benefits only those farmers who have larger parcels of fertile land. Those tilling relatively unproductive lands are likely to be left hanging dry. Also, the perennial issue with subsidy driven schemes as seen with drip irrigation is that the subsidy amount and release process limit the speed of adoption.
There are several other challenges that hinder the adoption of solar power driven irrigation systems.
For instance, there is the natural tendency among the marginalised to opt for what the “social betters” do. So even small and marginal farmers want a scheme based on free grid power. Secondly, even if there is a large subsidy, they are much poorer and reluctant to invest for their contribution in the scheme. Individual schemes have issues of drudgery if the panels and pumps are portable, and of security if they are not.
Also Read: How farmers flourish with community-owned solar-powered irrigation system in UP’s Bahraich
Many technical issues also pose challenges. Small and marginal farmers face the problem of accessing water with small capacity pumps that work well only for surface sources or if the groundwater is easy to draw. That limits the scope to Eastern riparian areas. In southern and western parts of the country where water tables have gone really low, both water and power can be big constraints. Then there is the issue of variable pressure from solar pumps which make them somewhat suboptimal for drip irrigation.
Also playing a part is the insufficient commercial interest shown for solar powered irrigation. If corporate firms discover that there is a huge market for solar powered pumps, it is likely that they would apply their talent ingenuity to address these issues. The interest is perhaps limited as of now because they assess that the policy of free unlimited power to farmers is here to stay given the competitive populism driven by the logic of democratic elections.
Also Read: Tribal dairy farmers prosper with ‘solar-irrigated’ fodder
The lead image at the top shows a solar powered irrigation system at Pusa in Bihar. (Source: Flickr)
This article is based on the discussions held during a webinar on “Experience with solar power based irrigation for the rural poor” organised on August 29. The interaction was moderated by Sanjiv Phansalkar, director, Vikas Anvesh Foundation, and featured the following speakers:
Victor Lesniewski, CEO and co-founder, Khethworks; Santanu Dutta, team lead, Odisha, Collectives for Integrated Livelihood Initiatives; Anil Kumar Verma, chief functionary, Preservation and Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature, Gaya; Kuntal Mukherjee, integrator, Chhattisgarh, Pradan; and Sushant Pushkarna, regional Director (South Bihar), Sarva Sewa Samity Sanstha
