PM-KUSUM: Solar Power for Farms

Imagine a farmer's irrigation pump, historically dependent on either an expensive, unreliable diesel generator or a heavily subsidised but often erratic grid electricity connection, being replaced by a solar-powered pump instead, running entirely on sunlight, with genuinely lower running costs and freedom from both diesel price volatility and grid power cuts. Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan, PM-KUSUM, exists specifically to make this shift happen at national scale.

The scheme runs through multiple components addressing different parts of farm energy use, standalone solar pumps replacing diesel or grid-powered irrigation pumps directly, and larger solar power plant installations on farmland that let farmers sell surplus electricity back to the grid, turning agricultural land into a genuine secondary income source beyond the crops grown on it.

Progress by April 2026 showed real but incomplete momentum, 10,90,815 standalone solar pumps installed against a target of 13,07,190, and 1,202.28 MW of solar capacity installed under the larger power-plant component against a considerably more ambitious 10,000 MW sanctioned target, showing the pump component has scaled considerably further relative to its goal than the larger solar plant component has.

This connects directly to the broader renewable energy push covered under Power elsewhere on this site, PM-KUSUM represents agriculture's specific contribution to India's solar capacity expansion, converting farmland, otherwise used purely for crop production, into dual-purpose land generating both food and electricity, a genuinely useful model for a land-constrained country needing to expand both agricultural output and clean energy capacity simultaneously rather than treating the two as competing land uses.