Solar Irrigation

In her mid-30s, Lino Lameko works as an assistant at the office of the national women’s council in Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu. She has come all the way from the Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean to Tilonia, a small village located in Ajmer in Rajasthan to become a “barefoot solar engineer”.

This is a simple guide that answers some of the most popular questions related to solar water pumps. This list of Q&A will help you understand what they are and their growing importance these days. Please click on a question for detailed information.

Irrigation system in India is often about big dams and hundreds of kilometres of canals that incur huge capital expenditure. Hence, policies at the central and the state level are mostly tilted in favour of big projects and often neglect micro-level solutions.

Haryana's agriculture sector uses seven lakh tubewells, most of which are connected to the grid as the state has a policy of providing highly subsidised electricity to farmers costing Rs. 6200 crore a year. As a result, groundwater exploitation is rampant.

As we leave behind the smooth, straight drive of NH 89 and take a dirt path that whirls around a few miles of undulating desert grassland, we end at a large patch of emerald green which looks outlandish. “The reason for such a spectacle in these harsh conditions lies close to the ground,” says Ravinder Chhabra, my local guide in Bikaner.

Since 1999, Bihar has borne the brunt of four droughts. Rainfall scarcity has affected farmers, depleted groundwater levels significantly, and led to an increase in the number of poor people in the state. What measures has the government taken to mitigate the impact?

Solar energy, which was until now only considered for small scale lighting is now slowly gaining tremendous popularity among farmers to pump irrigation water. The paper titled 'Karnataka’s smart, new solar pump policy for irrigation' published in the