BESCOM designed machinery wrongly assuming farmers used pumps with 5 HP capacity
Clueless about farmers’ ‘power’, especially in Kanakapura—the home turf of ‘power’ minister DK Shivakumar—the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM) had to defer implementation of its ambitious and first-of-its-kind ‘Surya Raitha’ (Solar Farmer) project by two years.
In the pipeline for over two years, the project saw the light of day on Friday, a few months before the state is set to go to polls. With the commissioning of the project that was announced in 2015, as many as 310 farmers in 11 villages of Kanakapura on the outskirts of Bengaluru have turned ‘Solar Farmers’. This makes Kanakpura the first taluk in India to irrigate fields using solar powered pumps.
To help farmers of Karnataka who were reeling under severe shortage of power and were unable to irrigate fields during the night, the state government had announced ‘Surya Raitha’ project back in 2015 and vowed to take up a pilot in Kanakapura taluk.
However, it took more than two years for the energy department to implement the project because the department grossly underestimated the capacity of irrigation pump (IP) sets used by farmers in the area.
Sources in BESCOM revealed that, initially, BESCOM engineers assumed that farmers used only IP sets with 5 HP capacity and, accordingly, designed the model.
“But when our engineers surveyed the villages for implementation of the project, several farmers were using IP sets with a capacity of 7 HP and a few even had 12 HP capacity pump sets. As per the government norms, farmers could avail free power for up to 5 HP pump sets. But there were only a few farmers who were using pump sets less than 5 HP in the project area, while the rest were all using high energy pumps for quick lifting of water which was ‘illegal’. But all of them were regularised under Akrama-Sakrama and, after achieving uniformity, the model was redesigned to suit farmers’ requirement,” a senior engineer with BESCOM explained.
“An entire feeder has been chosen for the project and we wanted it to be uniform as the result of the project in this area was effect its implementation in other parts of the state. Initially, we had planned to include 250 farmers and, after the thorough survey, additional 60 farmers were covered under the programme. The first unit of the solar pump set was commissioned in 2016 and, till date, 260 units have been completed. The remaining 50 units will soon be made operational. All these units till date have produced 11.67 lakh units of power,” explained P Rajendra Cholan, Managing Director of BESCOM.
On Friday, when the project was formally launched by RDPR minister HK Patil and energy minister DK Shivakumar, about 30 per cent farmers were using 30 HP capacity IP sets while others were using IP sets between 7.5 HP to 12 HP.
The project is being executed by SunEdison Solar Power India. Farmers using 5 HP capacity pump sets can lift water from a depth of 400 feet maximum and, more depth means that higher capacity solar pump sets have to be used. A pump set with 5 HP capacity would cost Rs 7.5 lakh and anything more than this would cost Rs 11 to Rs 12 lakh.
Farmers will be provided with an interest-free loan from the government which will be repaid over a span of 10-12 years by selling the excess power generated to the main grid. This will provide an alternative livelihood for a farmer other than agriculture besides addressing the power woes of urban areas.
Source: bangaloremirror.indiatimes
