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Solar parks the new enemies of India’s farmers

NEW DELHI — If a lack of water does not drive Mr Natthu Raja off his farm, an abundance of sunlight might.

NEW DELHI — If a lack of water does not drive Mr Natthu Raja off his farm, an abundance of sunlight might.

Indian farmers have long battled for access to water as factories encroach on agricultural land. Their newest adversary has the Prime Minister’s backing: Solar power farms looking for acreage to build on.

Mr Raja, who grows lentils in Lalitpur in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, said officials had told him solar power developers might want to buy his land. Growing lentils does not provide much income, yet Mr Raja said that without it, he has no future.

“Good agricultural land is fast disappearing, taken away by industrial projects,” said Mr Devinder Sharma, chairman of the New Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, an advocacy group. “Several highways have been built on extremely fertile land. We can’t allow solar plants to add to the problem.”

India’s cultivable land area shrank by about 400,000 ha to 182 million ha in the three years to March 2011, the latest available farm ministry figures showed. The states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, known as the nation’s granaries, reported some of the biggest declines. These are the same states that plan additions to solar capacity.

“It will definitely affect agriculture output, and a debate on that is just starting,” said Mr Raveesh Budania, a partner at Gurgaon-based consultancy Headway Solar.

Industry-or-agriculture has been a perennial dilemma in the world’s second-most populated country, where farming has been the traditional livelihood for more than half of India’s 1.25 billion people.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who came to power last May, aims to transform the economy into a global manufacturing hub. His first step: Keeping the lights on. Electricity supply in parts of the country falls short by as much as 20 per cent during peak hours, said the power ministry.

Plus, most of that power is generated by burning coal, which makes India’s emission pollution the highest in the world after the United States and China.

Mr Modi wants companies to spend US$160 billion (S$223 billion) in the next seven years building 100 gigawatts of solar power capacity. That would catapult solar from providing less than 1 per cent of the country’s annual electricity needs to almost a third of current demand.

While the government has said the land needs will be reduced by putting 40 per cent of the planned capacity on rooftops, some analysts have doubts about that target.

“The main obstacle with off-grid rooftops will be that the generation and consumption patterns may not match for every household,” said Mr Bharat Bhushan Agrawal, a New Delhi-based analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Without rooftops, the plan would require 50,000 solar farms of an industrial scale of 20 megawatts each, which would cover about 202,343 ha, or about twice the size of New York City.

While that is only a fraction of India’s 3.12 million sq km land mass, solar farms look for locations near urban areas where the demand is, as well as for easy connection to power transmission grids. The further from urban areas, the higher the costs to build transmission lines to the grid and the more power is lost in transmission. Farmland is favoured, even though prices can be as high as 10 times those of wasteland parcels, said Mr Shekhar Pathak, CEO of MBH Power, which bought agricultural land for a solar power station in Gujarat.

That puts pressure on farmers such as Mr Raja, who face drought and crop failures during summer heatwaves, which lead them into debt. While selling the land is a way out, Mr Raja wants to hold on to his because it is security for the future and gives him status in society as a landowner, he said. BLOOMBERG

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