Agriculture is where India’s electricity system is under the most strain and gets the least attention. Farm pumps draw enormous quantities of subsidised power, distribution companies lose money supplying it, and the supply itself is often rationed to odd hours.
PM-KUSUM — Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyaan — is the central scheme aimed at that problem. It is worth understanding properly, including where storage does and does not belong in it.
Three components, three different problems
The scheme has three parts, and they are frequently conflated:
- Component A — decentralised ground-mounted solar plants on barren or fallow farmland, feeding the local distribution network.
- Component B — standalone solar pumps for farmers without a grid connection.
- Component C — solarisation of existing grid-connected pumps, including feeder-level solarisation where an entire agricultural feeder is powered by solar.
MNRE targets for the scheme included 34,800 MW of additional solar capacity, 14 lakh standalone solar pumps and 35 lakh solarised grid-connected agricultural pumps by 31 March 2026.
Where each component stands
Component B has largely delivered. Against a sanctioned target of 13,07,190 pumps, 11,49,988 had been installed by 30 June 2026 — about 88 per cent.
Component C lagged for years, then jumped. Component C solarisations rose roughly 25-fold to about 2.6 lakh pumps — the fastest single-year growth since the scheme launched. Against a 35 lakh target that is still a small fraction, but the direction has changed sharply.
State performance varies enormously. Rajasthan has fully implemented its Component B allocation, and Kerala and Uttar Pradesh have made reasonable progress. Telangana, despite the largest allocation under the component at 28,000 pumps, had not reported a single completed installation, with Punjab and West Bengal recording negligible implementation. Maharashtra dominates both Component B and feeder solarisation. Our state guides — including Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Telangana — cover the wider energy policy context in each.
Why the components diverged
The gap between B and C is not administrative inefficiency. It is a difference in difficulty.
A standalone pump is a discrete transaction: one farmer, one subsidy, one installation, one day’s work. There is no distribution company, no land acquisition and no network study.
Feeder solarisation is structural reform. It needs land near the feeder, agreement from the distribution company, network hosting capacity, a workable commercial structure, and coordination across many stakeholders. That takes years, which is exactly what it has taken.
The recent 25-fold acceleration matters because it suggests those obstacles are beginning to clear — and Component C is where the actual energy system change lives.
Where storage genuinely fits
Here is the honest answer, and it is not what a battery supplier would prefer to say.
On an individual solar pump, a battery is usually poor value. A standalone pump runs while the sun shines and lifts water into a tank or onto the field. The storage medium is the water, and water tanks are dramatically cheaper per unit of useful output than lithium cells. Adding a battery to a pump is rarely the right engineering answer.
At the feeder level, storage becomes genuinely relevant. Once a whole agricultural feeder is solarised, several things follow:
- Generation peaks at midday while irrigation demand does not perfectly match it — the same daily mismatch described in India’s evening peak storage gap.
- The feeder must still serve farmers outside daylight hours, meaning either grid import or storage.
- Rural distribution networks were built to deliver power one way and now host generation, creating local voltage and stability issues of the kind addressed by grid stabilization.
At that scale, the battery is a network asset serving a feeder rather than an accessory on a pump — a microgrid or feeder-level installation, not a domestic one.
For agro-processing, the case is stronger still. Cold storage, dairy chilling, rice mills and food processing have exactly the load profile that storage suits — significant, extended, with real demand charges. Those uses are covered in our guide to BESS use cases by industry, and they are usually a better first project in a rural area than the pumps themselves.
What this means for you
- If you are a farmer or farmer producer organisation: for pumping alone, the tank is the cheaper store. Look at batteries when you have a load that must run when the sun does not — chilling, processing, or a facility rather than a field.
- If you are a developer: Component C feeder solarisation is the interesting pipeline. It is slower and more complex than a tendered grid project, but it is where rural storage demand will eventually come from.
- If you are a distribution company: feeder solarisation changes what your rural network has to do. Hosting capacity and voltage management on those feeders is a storage question before it becomes a complaint.
- If you run an agro-processing facility: your load profile is likely a better fit for storage than any pump. Start with your bill and the savings calculator, or get in touch and we will look at it with you.
Scheme components, targets, sanctioned allocations and progress figures change by notification and with each reporting period, and state-level implementation moves quickly. Treat this as an August 2026 snapshot and verify current PM-KUSUM terms with MNRE and your state nodal agency before relying on them.