CPR- Re-Powering Agriculture: Energy transition for an agricultural transformation
Channel: The Nudge Institute
Date: 2021-08-20

The Government of India has taken an important step by prioritising agriculture in the energy transition through PM-KUSUM scheme. There is a coincident emphasis on augmenting farmers’ income. In this session, we explore the possibility of leveraging the energy transition to act as a catalyst for reviving the agriculture sector and boosting farm dependent livelihoods. The transformative potential of electricity in for agriculture has already been demonstrated during the Green Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, falling costs of solar energy have instigated a process of change in one of the factors of production for agriculture – pump based irrigation. While solarisation of irrigation provides substantial advantages (daytime power, eased subsidy pressures, decarbonisation), a narrow focus on scaling up farm solar risks underexploiting the transformative potential of a transition. How could the changing nature of energy affect Indian agriculture, and consequently the lives and livelihoods of two-fifths of India’s workforce? Could that the imperative towards decarbonisation be synergized with broader developmental imperatives in the agricultural sector, and if so, how?