India has been a land of agriculture since the beginning of the early civilization. Starting from Honorable Late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Sashtri to current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, many great leaders have acknowledged and praised the role of Indian farmers in strengthening the Indian economy. Although India is considered to be one of the major crop producers in the world, its productivity per acre taken into account is very low.

Today, almost 70 percent of farmers in India grow a single crop during the year because they rely heavily on monsoon rains and don’t have access to other sources of water for irrigation. Although most farms have a good water table, the farmer is not able to utilize this source due to the lack of grid power to pump groundwater. Witnessing the hardships experienced by the Indian farmers at the macro level such as low farm productivity, scarcity of energy and exploitation of resources due to low adoption of micro-irrigation and fertigation, Vyoda was established to address these challenges adeptly.

Vyoda’s positive displacement pumps are specially designed to work on solar energy that incorporate advanced technologies to achieve higher efficiencies. Superior technology provides constant pressure

throughout the day which helps farmers to use micro-irrigation like drip irrigation and sprinklers enabling them to increase the yield and reduce water consumption.

“We believe in providing farmers with solar water pumps for irrigation which will not only increase farm productivity but also enable the farmers to adopt micro-irrigation practices thereby promoting sustainable farming. We understand that a solar water pump addresses the irrigation challenges encountered by the farmers. Although the concept of using off-grid solar power to drive pumps is almost 10 years old in the country most of the existing solutions are a force fit of technologies built for grid power. This is not an optimal solution since it is very inefficient not suitable for micro-irrigation and fertigation. This gave us the idea to develop a new pump grounds up, specifically to work on solar power,” says Vishnu Ranga, Director, Vyoda.

Being a positive displacement pump, the efficiency of Vyoda’s solar water pump remains high irrespective of irradiance available throughout the day. It starts pumping water during low irradiance hence works for longer hours in a day compared to the traditional centrifugal solar water pumps. Suitable for changing water tables, the efficiency of Vyoda’s pump remains constant across TDH whereas the efficiency of conventional centrifugal solar pumps drops substantially with the change in TDH.

Since Vyoda’s pump is a reciprocating positive displacement pump, it creates constant pressure throughout the day irrespective of waterflowrate, thereby allowing the farmer to irrigate 6-8 hours in a day. With in-built metering facility, Vyoda’s pump can accurately provide details of water pumped during the day without any additional metering. By promoting sustainable agricultural practices, Vyoda has emerged as an affordable smart irrigation solution provider through product innovation.

Talking about the future aspects of the company Vishnu shares, “Technology adoption is the key challenge due to lack of awareness at the farmer level. This needs to be addressed, both by Agritech companies as well as the governments. The government, through its nodal agencies needs to create awareness about new technologies and provide incentives to progressive farmers for the adoption of new technologies. Agritech companies need to take a different approach to meet the unique needs of each farmer.

Currently, we have completed field trials and while we are in the process of a limited commercial launch and we would like to roll out offering to 2-3 other states by the end of this year.”