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With subsidies cutting upfront costs and solar pumps reducing diesel and power expenses, farmers across India are gaining more predictable irrigation. However, there are a few challenges too. The Better India deep dives into analysing the solar shift in farming and the challenges.
With subsidies cutting upfront costs and solar pumps reducing diesel and power expenses, farmers across India are gaining more predictable irrigation. However, there are a few challenges too. The Better India deep dives into analysing the solar shift in farming and the challenges.
With reduced pump prices and government subsidies making the systems newly affordable, farmers all over the country are shifting to daytime irrigation, powered entirely by sunlight.
Long before the sun clears the tree line in Dawwa, a small village in Maharashtra’s Gondia district, the fields are already stirring.
There is no diesel canister to haul, no waiting for a transformer to hum back to life after last night’s outage. A farmer walks to the edge of a soybean plot, taps a switch, and water begins to move — pulled up from below and pushed through the furrows, powered by nothing more than the light falling from the sky.
For generations, irrigation in villages like Dawwa and elsewhere in the country was a negotiation with forces no farmer could control: the mood of the electricity grid, the price of diesel, the arrival — or non-arrival — of power at three in the morning.
Yogeshwari C Chaudhari, the Sarpanch of Gram Panchayat Dawwa, says, “Previously, irrigation relied on electricity availability or diesel fuel. Farmers had to bear the associated costs and endure the hardships caused by erratic power supplies.”
That single sentence captures decades of hardship — the late-night walks to switch on a pump the moment power flickered on, the anxious maths of diesel prices against a shrinking margin, the crops lost not to drought but to timing.
Solar has begun to rewrite that story. With reduced pump prices and government subsidies making the systems newly affordable, farmers all over the country are shifting to daytime irrigation, powered entirely by sunlight. The burden of “future expenses” is easing, one solar panel at a time.
But Dawwa’s story is not a simple tale of technology triumphant. It is also a story about the friction between good policy and difficult implementation — and it is being repeated, with local variations, across an entire country.
Nowhere has this shift moved faster than in Maharashtra.
The state has become India’s leader in solar pump adoption, with more than 7.47 lakh (747,000) solar agricultural pumps already installed and a target of 10.45 lakh (1.045 million) — making it the fastest-deploying state in the country and, remarkably, second only to China globally.
In December 2025, Maharashtra set a Guinness World Record by installing 45,911 solar pumps in just 30 days, a scale of rollout that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago.
Across India, the central government’s PM-KUSUM (Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan) scheme subsidises solar pump installations nationally. Its target is 34,800 MW of solar capacity by March 2026, backed by roughly Rs 34,422 crore in central financial assistance.
Maharashtra has its own scheme, the Magel Tyala Saur Krushi Pump Yojana (MTSKPY), which aims to ensure farmers across the state gain reliable access to solar irrigation.
Together, these schemes have turned what was once a costly, aspirational upgrade into something within reach of ordinary smallholders.
Across India, states are taking different approaches to the same goal.
Kerala’s 74% adoption rate places it at the top of the State Energy Efficiency Index 2024, which found that 13 states are now actively promoting integrated cold storage and solar-powered agricultural pumps in their farm sectors.
Chhattisgarh’s older Saur Sujala scheme requires farmers to contribute only about 5% of the cost and is widely regarded as a blueprint that helped shape the design of PM-KUSUM itself.
In Assam, where small tea growers have long relied on costly diesel, solar pumps reach cost parity with diesel by the third year of use — a slower payoff, but a meaningful one for growers with thin margins.
A solar pump works differently from the diesel and grid-connected electric pumps farmers have traditionally relied on.
A diesel pump is loud, expensive to run, and dependent on fuel that has to be bought, transported, and stored. A grid-connected electric pump is cheaper to operate but entirely dependent on a power supply that, in much of rural India, arrives on its own unpredictable schedule — often at night, when farmers must rouse themselves to irrigate fields in the dark, wary of snakes, fatigue, and wasted water.
A solar pump sidesteps both problems.
Panels installed beside the field convert sunlight directly into the electricity needed to run the pump, with no fuel purchases and no dependence on the grid. It runs when the sun is up — which is, conveniently, also when farmers are already in their fields, watching the water and able to stop it the moment it is no longer needed.
The cost of the pump varies by location, capacity and subsidy.
Farmer
Location
Farm
Pump
Amount paid / spending
Neeraj Parmar
Piploda, Madhya Pradesh
40 acres
7½ HP
Rs 43,000 in 2025; 90% subsidy
Narhar Dangi
Pipalkheda, Madhya Pradesh
5 acres
—
30 of 60 farmers in his area have switched to solar
Sachin Kumar
Jaspur, Uttarakhand
4 acres
7½ HP
Rs 86,000
Kishan Singh
Deoli, Rajasthan
—
—
Around Rs 72,000 a few years ago; comparable systems now cost closer to Rs 41,000
For Neeraj Parmar, a 37-year-old postgraduate in history from Piploda village in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore, the attraction is simple.
“I don’t have to wait for the power supply as I can run the pump whenever I can,” he says.
In Pipalkheda, in Madhya Pradesh’s Sehore district, 32-year-old Narhar Dangi farms five acres of soybean and wheat. Of the 60 farmers in his area, 30 have already switched to solar.
For Dangi, the change is measured in freed-up time and reduced anxiety as much as money.
“Irrigating my farm has become much easier, thanks to the solar-run pumps,” he says.
“I don’t have to wait for the nights when we get power supply. I can run my pumps using my mobile phone as it’s GPS-connected.”
The days needed for tilling and sowing have shortened, he notes, and the farm now needs fewer hired hands.
Further north, in Jaspur in Uttarakhand’s Udham Singh Nagar district, 26-year-old Sachin Kumar — a postgraduate in soil sciences — grows sugarcane on four acres, harvesting some 400 quintals per acre.
He paid Rs 86,000 for his 7½ horsepower pump; subsidies in Uttarakhand are lower than in states like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, or Maharashtra, so the upfront cost stung more.
But the payoff has been immediate.
“During the summer months like April, May and June when the crop needs to be irrigated, we often witness power shutdowns,” he says.
“And that’s when the solar pumps come to our aid. We save a lot on our power bills and diesel.”
Kumar estimates his daily diesel spending of nearly Rs 2,000 has dropped to almost nothing since the switch, with irrigation now falling into predictable daytime hours instead of whenever the grid allows.
Subsidies of 60% to 90% under PM-KUSUM have lowered the entry barrier further. Newer “irrigation-as-a-service” models — pay-per-use arrangements requiring no upfront cost — are beginning to open the technology to farmers who could never afford the initial investment at all.
In Maharashtra, farmers with less than five acres of land received up to a 95% subsidy for a 3 HP solar pump. Those with larger holdings could install 5 HP pumps at a fixed, heavily subsidised contribution of around Rs 30,000.
That difference has freed up capital that farmers say now goes towards seeds, other inputs, or household needs — money that would once have been locked up in the upfront cost of irrigation infrastructure.
The falling price of the pumps themselves has compounded these effects.
In Deoli village of Rajasthan’s Sirohi district, award-winning farmer Kishan Singh, 67, paid around Rs 72,000 for his solar pump when he first applied a few years ago. Farmers installing comparable systems in his region today are paying closer to Rs 41,000.
Taken together with the near-total elimination of recurring diesel and electricity expenses, the shift is beginning to change how farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand allocate money and plan their growing seasons.
Irrigation, once a recurring financial burden renewed every season, is becoming something closer to a one-time investment.
The financial case for solar pumps is one of their biggest attractions.
Solar pumps offer zero electricity bills and can save farmers between Rs 40,000 and Rs 70,000 annually compared with running a diesel pump.
In Uttar Pradesh alone, installed solar pumps have eliminated the consumption of 877.50 lakh litres of diesel every year — fuel that would otherwise have been burned, purchased, and hauled across the state’s farmland.
The pumps are also changing how farmers use water and time.
A study in Uttar Pradesh found that when farmers gained access to affordable solar irrigation, water usage more than doubled and the number of active users per pump jumped by 60%.
The increase enabled greater cropping intensity, additional crops per year, and more stable incomes.
For farmers, the appeal is not only financial.
Because irrigation happens during daylight, when farmers are present to monitor it, less water is wasted than during unsupervised night-time watering.
“We are free from frequent power breakdowns,” Dangi adds — and, in a small but real way, farmers like him are easing pressure on an overstretched power grid rather than adding to it.
Ashok Gaikwad, a Krishi Adhikari (agriculture officer) in Kalyan, in Maharashtra’s Thane district, sees the pattern repeating widely across his state.
“By eliminating diesel and electricity costs, solar pumps provide farmers with zero-cost, daytime reliable irrigation,” he says, “Enabling them to reinvest savings into crop diversification and modern techniques, while reducing dependence on erratic fuel supplies and cutting carbon emissions to align agriculture with climate goals.”
Yet the story solar pumps tell is not uniformly triumphant, and the ground itself has its own say in the matter.
A study led by the International Water Management Institute in Gujarat, conducted under the Solar Energy for Agricultural Resilience initiative, drew on data from more than 220 farmers across two cropping seasons.
The researchers asked a pointed question: can solar-powered irrigation actually reduce groundwater use, or does it simply make extraction easier?
The answer, they found, depends entirely on what lies beneath the field.
Anand
Botad
Aquifer
Alluvial
Hard rock
Impact of solar adoption on irrigation water use
Farmers applied up to 608 mm less irrigation water than non-solar neighbours
No measurable impact on irrigation water use
Key factor
Farmers could sell surplus electricity back to the grid
Groundwater availability was already the binding constraint
In Anand district, where the aquifer is alluvial, farmers with grid-connected solar pumps applied significantly less irrigation water — up to 608 millimetres less than their non-solar neighbours.
The reason was less about the technology itself than about the incentive structure around it. Because these farmers could sell surplus electricity back to the grid, they had a direct financial reason to use water more sparingly and let the panels earn their keep.
In Botad district, however, where the aquifer sits in hard rock, the picture was starkly different.
Solar adoption had no measurable impact on irrigation water use at all. There, the researchers concluded, groundwater availability itself — not the cost or convenience of energy — is already the binding constraint.
Without the possibility of feed-in income to reward restraint, and with abundant, cheap, sun-powered energy to run the pump, some farmers may simply extract more water than they did before, deepening the strain on an already fragile resource.
The lesson embedded in that contrast is one that policymakers scaling PM-KUSUM and similar schemes are only beginning to absorb: a single national template cannot deliver the same outcome everywhere.
Incentives and feed-in tariffs, the researchers argue, need to be tailored to local hydrogeological conditions if the goal is to protect groundwater while still expanding farmer incomes.
Solar irrigation is not automatically water-wise; it becomes water-wise only when the policy around it gives farmers a reason to treat water, not just energy, as the scarce resource it is.
Even as the scheme’s benefits are celebrated, farmers still face persistent obstacles.
Those TBI spoke to described:
long delays between application and approval;
a lack of clear and timely information on subsidy amounts;
uncertainty over their own financial share and the pump’s rated capacity;
cases of substandard equipment, including pumps, panels, and other components that fail to last; and
maintenance and repair services that arrive late, if at all, even after formal complaints have been lodged.
Yet even with such momentum, technology adoption in agriculture often stumbles at the stage of installation and upkeep. For farmers, irrigation access dictates cropping cycles, making timeliness critical.
“Typically, delivery takes 60–90 days after an order is placed. But we recognise the urgency of farming schedules. Our commitment is to align delivery with agricultural needs, ensuring farmers receive support exactly when required,” says Amulya Gupta, Director of Oswal Pumps.
Oswal Pumps, a vertically integrated Indian manufacturer offering solar, agricultural, domestic, and industrial pumping solutions, has already executed over 90,000 solar pump installations.
With an active order book exceeding 24,500 units and a pipeline of more than 25,000, the company has visibility on well over 140,000 pumps in various stages — underscoring its scale and reliability in meeting farmers’ needs.
In 2025, Dawwa’s Sarpanch, Yogeshwari Chaudhari, stepped into history as the first in India to win the Climate Action Special Panchayat Award (CASPA), bringing Rs 1 crore to fund grassroots climate projects.
With a farmer’s clarity, she cuts through the jargon:
“Streamline approvals, enforce quality, and hold vendors accountable.”
Far from rejecting solar pumps, Chaudhari speaks as someone who has seen their transformative benefits and wants the delivery system fixed so that, as she insists, “the maximum number of farmers can benefit from it.”
She embodies both sides of the story: the sunrise that now powers her neighbours’ pumps at no cost, and the paperwork that still blocks too many farmers from that same sunrise.
Between those two realities lies the unfinished story of solar’s arrival in rural India — not a completed revolution, but one still being built, field by field, village by village.
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