At the heart of India’s foodgrain system, Haryana is where state support meets the long, uneven histories of land, water, and farming.
Across rural India, solar pumps are being presented as a quiet revolution. Marketed as clean, cost-effective, and farmer-friendly, they promise relief from erratic power supply, rising diesel prices, and irrigation uncertainty. Through schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan (PM-KUSUM) and state agencies like the Haryana Renewable Energy Development Agency (HAREDA), solar energy has been positioned as a way to green agriculture while supporting rural livelihoods. On paper, the logic is straightforward: replace fossil fuels with sunlight, reduce farmers’ costs, and expand access to irrigation.
In water-stressed regions like Haryana, however, this transition unfolds on land shaped by decades of intensive groundwater extraction. Irrigation here is not merely a technical practice but a deeply embedded relationship between farmers, electricity, and the aquifer beneath their fields. Years of subsidised and unreliable grid power encouraged farmers to pump for long hours whenever electricity was available, normalising over-extraction as part of everyday farming.
Aquifers thinned gradually, while cultivation practices adapted to scarcity without fundamentally addressing it. Solar pumps enter this landscape not as a neutral technology, but as one that changes how and when water is drawn. By removing fuel costs and easing time constraints, solar irrigation makes pumping cheaper, more flexible, and less visible, particularly where groundwater stress is already acute. What changes is not dependence on groundwater, but the ease of accessing it.
Under PM-KUSUM, farmers pay 25 per cent of the cost of a solar pump, with 30 per cent covered by the Centre and 45 per cent by the state. A typical 5 HP pump costs ₹2.5–3 lakh, leaving farmers to pay ₹60,000–75,000 upfront, hardly negligible for smallholders. Across pump capacities ranging from 3 to 10 HP, upfront contributions fall between ₹58,750 and ₹83,250. While officials point to rising demand and expanding installations, success continues to be measured in numbers and installations and megawatts added, leaving less visible the deeper questions of how solar pumping reshapes water use, land relations, and groundwater governance.
A solar pump of 5 hp operating through a small grid installed in Bhalaut, Haryana
Beyond the pump: Historical and ecological context
Can solar pumping be understood as a standalone technology, separate from the ecological and political histories into which it is introduced? As Dr Guru Koppa, an agricultural expert points out, north-west India is a region where electricity once flowed almost freely. Decades of subsidised power forged an intimate relationship between farming and the underground. Relentless pumping fractured aquifers and gradually made cultivation more precarious. Cheap and abundant electricity normalised extraction, turning overuse into a routine part of agricultural life rather than an exception.
A key driver of this pattern was farmers’ reliance on electric pumps connected to erratic agricultural feeders with no fixed hours of supply. Power arrived unpredictably, often late at night or for short windows. To cope, farmers left pumps running for long stretches whenever electricity was available, embedding over-extraction into everyday irrigation practice. Over time, this behaviour became part of the rhythm of farming, even as groundwater levels declined.
This history surfaces even in popular humour. On kabaddi grounds in Haryana, a common taunt – “boond boond pani katha kar liya, ab jeetna hai toh submersible chalana padega” (“you’ve collected enough drops; now to win, fire up a submersible pump”)—draws laughter precisely because it reflects a shared understanding. The ability to pump water signals power, and is inseparable from access, control, and the politics of cultivation.
Solar pumps enter this already stressed landscape not as a neutral intervention, but as a technology that deepens existing habits. Unlike diesel pumps, they carry no recurring fuel costs. Unlike grid electricity, they are not constrained by load-shedding or fixed supply hours. Instead, they enable near-continuous daytime pumping in regions where groundwater pressure is already high. What solar changes is not the impulse to extract water, but the conditions under which extraction occurs: financial deterrents disappear, temporal limits loosen, and pumping becomes easier to sustain and less visible.
Solar expansion and water pathways
Under the PM-KUSUM scheme, solar expansion in agriculture follows three pathways. One converts farmland—barren, fallow, or even cultivable—into energy sites, raising complex questions around land use and ownership. These tensions have surfaced in places like Jaisalmer, where villagers resisted a proposed 1,500 MW power plant. The other two pathways are more directly tied to water: distributing stand-alone solar pumps to off-grid farmers as replacements for diesel, and solarising existing grid-connected pumps, either individually or at the feeder level.
Farmers around Rohtak district highlight the ease of operating pumps through mobile applications. The key benefit is no longer needing to be physically present in the field. Yet this very convenience further distances farmers from land and water. Over-extraction becomes quicker, simpler, and harder to perceive.
Solar pumps remove both the cost of diesel and the supply barrier of electricity, effectively enabling unlimited daytime pumping. Beneath the promise of clean energy, this raises a harder question: what is being exchanged when sunlight replaces diesel, and public subsidies flow into already stressed aquifers?
Electricity grid passing through the fields, where ‘dhaan katna’ or rice harvests were on their way.
“Dark zones” and the limits of classification
According to Subir Sangwan, Project Officer for Renewable Energy at Haryana’s DRDA, the state restricts subsidies in “dark zones”— villages where groundwater has fallen below 100 feet. A 20 October 2023 order placed solar pump installations in these areas under a feasibility regime rather than banning them outright.
The notification introduced a groundwater-depth threshold, triggering mandatory micro-irrigation, enhanced site-level scrutiny, and app-based verification, with vendors responsible for compliance at installation. These measures cover districts including Ambala, Bhiwani, Charkhi Dadri, Fatehabad, Gurugram, Jind, Kaithal, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Mahendargarh, Nuh, Panchkula, Rewari, Sirsa, Yamuna Nagar, and Sonepat. This state-level approach complements the Central Ground Water Board’s framework, which designates blocks as over-exploited when extraction exceeds recharge.
Classification, however, remains a blunt tool. PM-KUSUM guidelines rely on village-level data from June 2020 to determine eligibility, flattening local variation and obscuring seasonal and longer-term changes. Areas officially classified as safe can quickly move toward stress under increased pumping. Timing and scale also mismatch: subsidies operate on multi-year cycles, while groundwater levels are recorded four times a year. Block-level classifications mask differences between neighbouring villages or even adjacent fields. Without finer-grained or participatory data, the link between extraction and regulation remains weak, leaving solar pumping impacts poorly understood.
The District Rural Development Agency (DRDA), where solar governance is translated from national policy into district-level implementation through files, approvals, and everyday bureaucratic work.
Use, mobility, and governance challenges
Policies attempt to manage uncertainty through safeguards. Farmers must install micro-irrigation systems—drip, sprinkler, or underground pipelines, to limit draw. Remote Monitoring Systems (RMS) track power generation, pump activity, and location. Yet field accounts suggest most farmers rarely engage with RMS, seeing it as distant and irrelevant to daily decisions. Reviews by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water show a fraction of pumps reliably transmit data; geotags and ownership details are often missing, and technical compliance is uneven. A HAREDA departmental order on misuse, dislocation, and shifting of solar pumps under PM-KUSUM documents widespread mobility. As of September 2025, over 2,000 pumps had been disconnected for more than 180 days, and more than 2,000 showed location mismatches exceeding 100 metres on the scheme portal.
Farmers in Rohtak report moving pumps between water sources and using them for both domestic and agricultural purposes. These adjustments reflect labour and convenience, not evasion. Vendors flag cases for verification, but these checks stabilize administrative records more than capture actual extraction patterns. Micro-irrigation requirements and remote monitoring enforce compliance on paper but do not create the situated knowledge needed to track groundwater use. As a result, aquifers remain under strain despite formal oversight.
Movable solar, less a fixed installation and more a flexible resource to be deployed across uses.
Micro-irrigation is framed as conservation. But without limits on extraction, can it meaningfully reverse groundwater decline?
Subsidies, solar pumps, and what we don’t measure
Solar subsidies in India are designed to create demand and they succeed. Much existing research focuses on why users adopt green energy in the first place. As researcher Deepak Sangroya argues, adoption is only the first step. His work shows that while financial incentives explain why solar pumps are taken up, they say little about how pumping reshapes land use and groundwater extraction over time.
This is where a key gap emerges. Farmers hold deep, lived knowledge of their land, of soils, seasons, and water behaviour. Yet programmes promoting solar irrigation invest little in strengthening or using this knowledge. Instead, success is measured by numbers: pumps installed, capacity added, megawatts generated.
Scholars like Tushaar Shah have long argued that groundwater is shaped by millions of everyday farming decisions. Technology alone cannot make groundwater use sustainable without aligning farmer practices with ecological limits. Without this alignment, solar pumps risk speeding up extraction faster than understanding.
What farmers see and what slips out of view
These challenges are sharper in states like Haryana, where groundwater conditions vary widely across districts. The state also spans multiple agro-ecological zones, from water-stressed districts in the south and south-west to canal-irrigated tracts in the north and east, with sharp differences in soils, cropping patterns, recharge potential, and groundwater behaviour even between neighbouring districts.
Treating solar irrigation as a uniform solution ignores this diversity and allows pumping to expand faster than local ecosystems can handle.
Some farmers believe this could have been avoided. Virender Singh, an organic farmer from Bhalaut, shares : “If solar irrigation had been piloted slowly, we would have seen the impacts earlier. Now the damage becomes visible only after schemes have expanded.”
Researchers warn that unless success is redefined, programmes like PM-KUSUM risk subsidising groundwater decline rather than sustainability. Instead of counting pumps or megawatts alone, they argue for linking energy targets directly to water outcomes, for example, tracking groundwater use per megawatt generated. Doing so would require decentralised monitoring and ways to formally include farmer knowledge, rather than relying only on top-down reporting. As Shivaprakash Nagaraju of The Nature Conservancy has noted, renewable energy projects in India are often planned around generation efficiency, with far less attention to land, water, and social context, a gap that becomes especially visible in solar irrigation.
If solar irrigation is to be truly sustainable, learning must scale alongside infrastructure. Energy access cannot move faster than our ability to understand and govern the land and water it depends on. Without knowledge, demand becomes extraction without responsibility.
This story is produced as part of the India Water Portal Regional Story Fellowship 2025.