Irrigation as a Service model for smallholder farmers in UP
Smallholder farmers in the Terai region of Uttar Pradesh currently have to incur a very high cost of irrigation because they are primarily reliant upon rented Diesel Gensets (@130–200 rs per hour).
Despite significant improvements in access to energy infrastructure in villages, getting a 3 phase electricity connection to operate Irrigation pumps remains prohibitively expensive for smallholder farmers. Each connection costs upwards of 1.5 lakh Rs (with additional fixed operating expenses of 750–1000 Rs per month) apart from expenses of borewell drilling and pump (roughly 50,000–80000 Rs) making an electricity operated irrigation pump unviable for a smallholder farmer to own and operate on an individual level. The government is making a big push to subsidise and distribute small scale solar operated pumps to smallholder farmers but they are still more costly than grid connected pump alternatives.
While larger farmers (owning >10 Acres of land) are able to invest in their own electricity driven irrigation systems and avail the benefit of lower operating cost for irrigation of c. 1000 Rs per acre per year, the smallholder farmers end up paying between 10,000 Rs to 15,000 Rs per year (1300–1500 Rs per irrigation cycle through gensets) for the same access to irrigation water. Over this, 2 manual laborers are required for each flood irrigation cycle. The cost of irrigation represents 30–50% of their overall cost of cultivation (in case of food crops like Wheat + Rice). Last but not the least, because of the hassle of renting, installing and operating of diesel gensets for every cycle, smallholder farmers are forced to undertake flood irrigation leading to overexploitation and wastage of water while also impacting crop growth (It’s proven by studies that regular irrigation with smaller dosages of water is better for crop growth than flood irrigation that forces all the air
from Soil and induces stressed growth). The Terai belt of eastern Uttar Pradesh is the hub for cultivation of water intensive crops like Sugarcane and Rice (which supports roughly 75% of the population in these areas), but due to overexploitation of groundwater resources without any regard to sustainability is starting to cause a wide multitude of problems.
It has been recently reported that UP could face 10–15% water deficit for
Irrigation over the coming 10 years. Urgent intervention is required for design and implementation of more efficient models of irrigation to sustain groundwater levels, improve agronomic productivity and prevent pollution from extensive usage of inefficient diesel based gensets.
A ‘shared pump’ represents the best solution (cost benefit tradeoff) in this case as that allows for a higher capacity utilisation of the same system, by servicing more number of farmers (and thereby spreading a high fixed cost over multiple users and converting high upfront fixed cost into operating expenditure). The government in Uttar Pradesh has previously implemented government owned and operated tube well systems as well but they aren’t very effective. Issues range from non maintenance, to operators demanding
money over and above government salaries, theft of the iron pipes, and unavailability of water on demand etc.
While piecemeal innovation has happened across many dimensions like more efficient design of pumps, increased electricity access (almost 100% grid connectivity across villages), design of smart irrigation controllers, design and proliferation of smart sprinkler systems, no one has really attempted to bring these innovations together to create a functional system that delivers a clear tangible demonstrable benefit to the smallholder farmers.
In the following post, I will share more about what i believe could be an elegant solution and our experiments and interventions so far on this front.
