How is India using its solar pumps for irrigation?
Hindustan TimesThe government of India has been aggressively promoting solar pumps for irrigation in recent years. However, since most of these solar pumps have a Remote Monitoring System, one can use the RMS data to assess their utilisation. In this brief, we analyse the RMS data from the Saur Sujala Yojana, a solar pump promotion scheme by Chhattisgarh—the leading state in the deployment of solar pumps. For this brief, we analyse data from 1,131 solar pumps in Chhattisgarh, India’s leading state in the deployment of solar pumps. We recommend the following to state governments: carry out a survey to identify the reasons for the suboptimal utilisation of the deployed solar pumps and improve the utilisation of publicly-supported solar pumps by i) reducing subsidy on larger pumps and promoting smaller-sized pumps, ii) encouraging pump sharing and community-owned deployments, and iii) promoting non-irrigation use of the available solar energy to power complementary livelihood activities such as post-harvest processing during non-irrigation seasons.