Sustainably Powering Rural India's Agricultural Sector

Growing up in the 1990s in Kolkata, one thing that was common in the summer was “load-shedding”.

- Sahil Shanghavi

A load shedding would be performed by the utility and happened when electricity generation capacity could not meet the excessive load on the grid. Since then, the cities have come a long way. Now a load shedding may happen every once in a while, but are not nearly as common in Calcutta or any other metropolitan city for that matter. However the same cannot be said about rural India.

Looking at the current scenario, agrarian distress is real and continuing. Water crisis has become a reality with resources beginning to be depleted in many states. Rural India continues to remain the heart of the country accounting for more than 70% of the population and agriculture continues to be the primary occupation of rural homes and the backbone of their means of survival and socioeconomic structure.

The Indian economy which is the one of the fastest-growing among the large global economics of the world still lags substantially when it comes to rural development. The limitation to development and growth is the lack of basic infrastructure like electricity, access to clean water and sanitation. This is hampering productivity as well as growth in these regions.

For the mobilization of this large population and to support their daily activities and development a decent bit of energy is required. Overall, there is a significant gap between the demand and supply. And this gap cannot be fulfilled only by conventional sources of energy at an economical price. This is where the use of solar energy can be leveraged.

Nearly 300 million people in rural India do not have access to grid-connected power and are forced to use high emission sources of energy as fuel like diesel, kerosene, and wood for agriculture. These are not only hazardous to the environment but also to one’s health.