Smallholder farmers in the Indo-Gangetic plains of northern India are severely affected by the agricultural and climate crisis, experiencing low and inconsistent incomes due to declining productivity.
In rural areas, low-quality grid electricity encourages enterprises to adopt non-grid sources, such as polluting fossil fuels, for essential activities like irrigation and milling. Less than 25% of households that irrigate use grid electricity (Rural Electrification in India: Customer Behaviour and Demand, Smart Power India, 2019). Although solar pumps are cost-effective in the long run, their high initial price makes them unaffordable. Furthermore, traditional farming practices and the overuse of chemical fertilisers degrade soil health, worsening the cycle of low productivity and poverty.
Oorja, a social enterprise focused on sustainable agriculture and renewable energy, addresses these challenges. It finances, deploys, owns, operates, and maintains decentralised solar infrastructure on farms, offering irrigation, milling, and climate-smart advisory services to small and marginal farmers. The company has introduced the innovative Irrigation-as-a-Service (IaaS) model to eliminate the upfront cost barrier of solar technology. IaaS provides a sustainable and dependable irrigation solution on a flexible pay-per-use basis. Oorja manages the entire process, from financing and deployment of solar infrastructure to continuous maintenance and support, allowing farmers to focus entirely on crop cultivation. Oorja currently operates across six districts in the Uttar Pradesh state of northern India.
Oorja was among the winners of the SET Alliance EaaS Innovation Showcase Award in 2024, recognising the impact of their work in a case study that provides detailed information on their technical solution and the business model they used.
With the strategic support of REPIC, BASE will support Oorja by transferring core know-how regarding the design, financing, and scaling of “as-a-service” business models. Drawing on its extensive experience from the Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Efficiency-as-a-Service (EaaS) initiatives, BASE will collaborate with Oorja to build bankable business models and recommend optimal financing structures that attract institutional lenders, such as leases, SPVs, or off-balance-sheet models. To ensure the financial robustness of Oorja’s Irrigation-as-a-Service model, this partnership will focus on developing sophisticated pricing and cost-optimisation models, which will be integrated into new digital dashboards and asset monitoring systems to enhance operational efficiency and data-driven decision-making.
Furthermore, BASE will anchor these technical advancements with best practices for the sustainable governance of decentralised assets and the creation of customer-centric capacity-bridging materials designed to deepen farmer engagement.
In the context of this project, Oorja and BASE aim to reach a total of around 400 pumps deployed under the Pay-Per-Use model installed by the end of the project, which would represent an additional 200 compared to the pre-project situation and serve 3000 more farmers. This would expand the irrigated area by 3,847 acres and could create over 150 additional last-mile green jobs. Replacing the diesel generators with solar-powered systems is estimated to avoid the use of over 600 tonnes of diesel, yielding an additional 2,000 tonnes of GHG emission reduction. The project also aims to improve gender balance among customers and train over 3,000 farmers in climate-smart agricultural practices.
