In Tulyachapada village in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, solar-powered drip irrigation has helped farmers access water that was earlier close by but difficult to bring to their fields.
The project uses 10 shared solar pumps and a 10-km pipeline to support 108 households and farmer groups across the village.
Cultivated land has increased from four to five acres before 2019 to 95.77 acres, with groundnut, vegetables and fruit trees adding new income streams.
Farmers say year-round irrigation has reduced dependence on rainfall, improved incomes and cut distress migration after the kharif season.
Farmer Pandurang Lahare, 38, is relieved he no longer has to make the daily two-kilometre journey to the water source in Tulyachapada, his village in Maharashtra’s Palghar district. “Now the water comes to me,” he beams. The result is visible on his two-acre farm: groundnut on one acre, mango on half an acre and cashew on the remaining.
The change has been made possible by a solar-powered pump system shared by 10 farmers. There are 10 such pumps installed in the village. “Now, we are not so dependent on the rain. We can farm with or without it,” Lahare says.
The project, in Maharashtra’s Mokhada block, has been made possible by non-profit Pragati Pratishthan, which provided on-ground handholding, and energy access provider Gram Oorja Pvt Solutions. At present, 108 households are benefiting from it.
The importance of this innovation becomes clearer when seen against the geography of Tulyachapada. The hamlet has long struggled with water access despite being close to the Morchondi dam, also called the Tulyachapada dam, which has an effective storage capacity of 1.93 million cubic metres.
For years, most farmers in the region grew only paddy and millets. Dependent on rain, they were caught in a cycle of seasonal unemployment after the monsoon. For the rest of the year, many were forced to migrate to nearby cities for daily wage work.
Solar-powered drip irrigation has now made year-round farming possible. It offers two gains at once: farmers can diversify their crops and reduce distress migration.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has used the term ‘climate migrants’ while referring to research on how migration flows can be linked to climate change. Periods of drought are one possible trigger.
In Tulyachapada, however, farmers say it was not drought alone that pushed them into daily wage work after the kharif season, which lasts from June to October. It was the inaccessibility of available water.
Did they enjoy the alternative livelihood? Farmer Ramdas Jadhav’s answer suggests otherwise.
Come November, the 40-year-old would pack his bag and leave for Nashik or Mumbai with other farmers. “After the kharif season, there were no options for earning in the village,” he says.
“Life in the city wasn’t easy. Yes, we used to earn Rs 300-500 a day for lifting bricks and helping in the construction of buildings. But we are farmers. We aren’t used to that kind of work. It was very tough.”
The drip irrigation project, introduced in 2019, did more than strengthen farmers’ economic security. It also helped address one of the roots of forced migration.
Lahare remembers what migration did to family life. “We missed our families. I would usually move to the cities alone. My children were in school, and my wife had to remain in the village to look after the farm. At the time, getting water was also a daily struggle. My wife had to walk to the well every morning, collect water and bring it back for domestic needs.”
A 2025 study assessing the effect of migration on ‘left-behind families’ suggests that the pressures of migration cut both ways. While remittances can improve living standards, they also add to the burden on those who stay behind.
That tension is where this story lives. At its heart is a farmer’s simple question: “I am a farmer. Why should I leave my fields and go away?” Jadhav asks.
A 2024 paper published by the Centre for Development, Policy and Practice explores the complex relationship between migration and development in Maharashtra. It examines the challenges faced by rural migrants who move to Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur in search of better livelihoods.
“This migration, often driven by desperation, comes with its own set of challenges, including precarious employment, inadequate housing, and limited access to social welfare schemes. Many migrants from drought-prone regions like Marathwada and Vidarbha end up in informal settlements or slums, where living conditions are often dire,” the paper states.
Ten pumps. One hundred acres. This is the model that has changed farming prospects in Tulyachapada.
Supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and implemented by Pragati Pratishthan with technical partner Gram Oorja Private Solutions, the initiative provided 10 farmer groups with sustainable access to water, increasing agricultural output, farmer incomes and food security.
The results show its feasibility. A 10-kilometre pipeline enabled farmers to access stored water well beyond the kharif season. This soon translated into cultivation of a second crop — groundnut. In 2021, farmers also began growing vegetables such as onions, bitter gourd, cucumbers and chillies.
According to a report prepared by Pragati Pratishthan, cultivated land has increased from just four to five acres before 2019 to 95.77 acres. Vegetable cultivation expanded from zero in 2019 to 38.47 acres in 2025. In 2024 alone, roughly 19.7 tonnes of vegetables and fruits were produced.
The area under groundnut cultivation increased from around four to five acres before installation to 48 acres in 2019. In 2025, it stood at 57.3 acres.
Over time, the partners realised that there was not only a need for multi-cropping systems in the region, but also a strong appetite for them. Fruit trees were introduced along field perimeters, with 58 trees planted per farmer, adding a longer-term revenue stream.
Total income from agricultural activities has shown a steady upward trend, rising from Rs 18,33,864 in 2021 to Rs 31,08,243 in 2024. Vegetable and fruit sales brought farmers an additional Rs 8,08,573 between 2021 and 2024, showing the financial benefits of multi-cropping.
Solar pumps lift water from the source and distribute it to farmers’ fields through a pipeline network. The system is also compatible with drip irrigation, allowing farmers to use water more efficiently. In Tulyachapada, this helped farmers grow groundnut.
It is not easy to trust a new crop after decades of relying on paddy.
This is what farmer Pandurang Chaudhary, 39, discovered in 2018 when the idea of groundnut was first suggested. He saw it as a risk. Paddy was his safety net; groundnut was an experiment that needed a contingency plan.
Eight years later, he remembers that risk as the decision that changed his fortunes. Against an earlier income of around Rs 25,000 a season, Chaudhary now earns about Rs 60,000 per season. Sometimes, this figure touches Rs 1 lakh.
Lahare says the additional income helped him secure admission for his daughter to a BSc course at a good college.
He and other farmers credit Pragati Pratishthan for guiding them through the new model.
“We learnt how to prepare and use jeevamrit, a liquid bio-fertiliser, make organic fertilisers, practise organic farming and make better use of the cows and buffaloes we already had. We also learnt how to prepare manure from cow dung,” Lahare says.
The farmers had doubts at first, Jadhav admits.
“When the team came to our village to conduct the survey and told us about solar-powered irrigation, I didn’t really know much about solar energy. We had seen solar lamps in the cities, but we had never thought about using solar for farming. Naturally, we had questions: What if the system encountered a problem? What about cloudy days? Would one pump be sufficient for my field?”
He says the team reassured them that help would be available if anything went wrong.
Established in 1972, Pragati Pratishthan has been working to support tribal communities by addressing water scarcity. Project Manager Jayram Bhasme says one-to-one conversations with farmers were central to building trust.
“We conducted a survey to understand their concerns,” he says. At the time, around 60 per cent of the farmers used to migrate for work after the monsoon.
Agricultural experts helped identify groundnut as a crop that would perform well in the area and advised the team on cultivation and irrigation requirements. Farmers were then trained.
Today, the irrigation system is self-sustaining. Along with training farmers to use the pump system, Bhasme says they were also helped to understand where and how to market their groundnuts.
Sarpanch Devidas Nisal says the pump system has brought positive change to Tulyachapada and Bhoryachapada. The drip irrigation model is benefiting his field too.
“Earlier, even when water was available nearby, we did not have the means to bring it to our farms. With the solar pumps, we are now able to irrigate our fields even during periods when water was otherwise difficult to access,” he says.
Bhasme says the support often went beyond the core project.
“The farmers told us there was no electricity in their fields. Since they spend a significant amount of time there, this was a problem. So, as part of the project, we also provided them with solar lamps so they could work in their fields after dark,” he adds.
What began in 2008 with three friends — Sameer Nair, Anshuman Lath and Prasad Kulkarni — exploring the potential of solar solutions to transform villages has grown into 1,200 energy-access projects across 700 villages in India.
That is the story of how Gram Oorja Private Solutions grew into a collective championing energy access through grassroots-level projects.
Sameer says their work succeeds when innovation blends functionality with local context. The company’s interventions include microgrids, water pumping for domestic and irrigation purposes, and biogas systems for communities.
Around 35,000 lives have been positively impacted through the installation of more than 100 pumps and 55 microgrids in Maharashtra’s Palghar, Melghat and Nandurbar districts, Jharkhand’s Gumla and Khunti districts, and Karnataka’s Dandeli forest region. More than 1,700 small landholding farmers and their families have been able to grow a second and third crop on previously unirrigated farmland through 400 group irrigation projects.
In Tulyachapada, migration has reduced by 90 per cent.
One of the strongest features of the model is that it reduces dependence on project providers.
“Tulyachapada was our first project where we brought together a group of farmers and developed a self-sustaining model. We formed groups of 10 farmers, with each farmer owning about one acre of land. Individual farmers often cannot afford irrigation pumps because the systems are too expensive and have a capacity larger than what a one-acre farm requires. By forming a group, the cost could be shared, and farmers could use the water at different times according to their needs,” Sameer says.
He adds: “Each farmer’s share of the irrigation system cost around Rs 80,000, which was funded through CSR support. Once the irrigation system became operational, each farmer was able to generate an additional revenue of around Rs 50,000. The underlying idea was that the second crop would make the model self-sustaining: farmers could generate additional income from their land and eventually repay the cost of the system themselves.”
The Tulyachapada model sets a precedent for how villages in India can make better use of available water through sustainable innovation.