By Dr. Rajan Kapur, President, IEEE Smart Village, Boulder, CO, USA

The mission of IEEE Smart Village (ISV) is “Empowerment through Enterprise.” ISV supports multi-year initiatives built on three pillars: growing local enterprises based on electrification, productive use of technology, and enhancing education to improve livelihoods in underserved communities. By supporting local, self-governed, self-sustaining, and scalable enterprises, ISV also aims to address climate change by electrifying rural economies.

Kudagaon is an off-grid Island on a major river in southeastern India. The inhabitants are subsistence farmers, earning about $350/year from rain-fed agriculture that produced one crop per year. Even today, there is no bridge to access the island. In 2019, SunMoksha Power Pvt. Ltd., commissioned a solar microgrid to provide village lighting, and power a few basic appliances and village enterprises. However, irrigation water remained an unfulfilled need. In 2023, SunMoksha secured additional funding from ISV for building a smart irrigation system.

This phase consisted of enhancing the capacity of the microgrid from 19.5kWp to 26kWp to accommodate a 10hp pump drawing water from the river to and pumping it to a 150 thousand-liter sump. This avoids the use of diesel pumping, which is polluting and has high operational costs. Another stand-alone pumping system of 5kWp was installed in this sump to deliver water to 30 acres of land. It includes integration of Smart AQUAnet™, an IoT and cloud solution that optimizes water usage and increases productivity for a given liter of water. The water supply management is based on real-time data from sensors (soil moisture) communicating with cloud computing operated by SunMoksha. Individual farmers decide irrigation duration, based on local sensor data.

SunMoksha has trained several local inhabitants, and constructed the system. It will transfer ownership to a Village Water Committee, comprised of local inhabitants and a representative from SunMoksha. The committee will run the system as a business: they will operate the facility, and provide front line maintenance. They will escalate more complex issues to SunMoksha, who will also monitor the system remotely. The Committee will set tariffs, collect monthly dues and operate a bank account. The funds will be used for operations and maintenance, and future expansion. This model has been proven very successful with their Smart Microgrid implementation where the savings were used for O&M and for battery replacement within five years of operations.

The villagers are looking forward to using smart irrigation to increase their income from approximately $350/year to $1000/year by growing multiple crops a year.

Volunteer support from IEEE members and donations from IEEE Societies and Councils makes this possible. We welcome IEEE members to participate as enterprise mentors and monitors, and to participate in back-office work to grow the impact of IEEE in underserved parts of South Asia and other regions.