DISQ

ROLE :

Design Innovator

TIMELINE :

10 months

TOOLS :

systems design, qualitative research, cultural studies

TCS Foundation initiative

Project Overview

About

A venture-building project at an incubator exploring how renewable energy can enable farmer-led entrepreneurship in India’s agri-energy ecosystem.

My Role

I led systems and opportunity mapping, conducted ethnographic research with 300+ farmers, and facilitated multi-stakeholder workshops and pitches across agriculture, energy, and policy.

Why This Matters

Despite growing access to solar energy, farmers continue to face unreliable power and low incomes. This project explored why energy does not translate into value — and what it would take to change that.

Outcome

The work led to the exploration of decentralised, community-owned models and more importantly, a deeper understanding of where *not* to build within the system.

Conducted as part of Digital Impact Square (DISQ), a Tata Consultancy Services Foundation initiative focused on grassroots innovation.

CONTEXT

Farmers face unreliable electricity on already fragile farm economics. At the same time, solar adoption is increasing — through pumps, schemes, and decentralised energy efforts.

This revealed a deeper contradiction:

If options for alternate energy are improving, why are farmers still unable to access it?

What began as a question about renewable energy quickly became a larger systems question.

RESEARCH

What we heard on ground

To understand the problem properly, I looked at it through multiple lenses: the realities of farmers, the logic of the energy ecosystem, and the role of institutions shaping adoption.

This involved:

ethnographic research with 300+ farmers
conversations with stakeholders across agriculture, solar, finance, policy, and infrastructure
mapping relationships between energy access, farm practices, business models, and local systems

Farmers

Solar developers

Agronomists

Discom officers

Farmer producer organisations

RnD / Thinktanks

Across research, a pattern emerged:

farmers were not unaware or resistant. Many were curious about new technologies, aware of solar, and actively experimenting with alternatives. But they were still constrained by a system that made adoption difficult and value capture even harder.

KEY INSIGHTS

Electricity is unreliable and poorly timed

Power supply often does not align with irrigation needs or agricultural rhythms, directly affecting how farms operate.

Affordability is a bigger barrier than awareness

Farmers may be interested in solar and agri-tech, but financial bandwidth is often the real constraint.

Solar exists, but is underutilised

A large amount of solar energy generated on farms goes underutilised, especially in off-grid or poorly integrated systems.

There is no clear system to convert energy into income

Even where energy is generated, farmers often lack channels, infrastructure, or institutional support to monetise surplus electricity.

A tribal region operating only on solar energy

SYSTEMS MAPPING

Once the field insights became clear, the next step was to understand why the problem persisted even when multiple solutions already existed.

At its simplest, farmers operate within a system of:

ENERGY

grid, solar, pumps, supply

RESOURCES

MARKETS

FAMILY CULTURE

INSTITUTIONS

land, water, labour, equipments

buyers, pricing, local demand

Cultural norms, shared land

policy, finance, infrastructure, schemes

But this system is fragmented and breakdowns happen across multiple levels:

To make this legible, I mapped the agri-energy ecosystem across stakeholders, flows, dependencies, and bottlenecks. This helped surface a more important truth: renewable energy adoption alone does not create opportunity unless the surrounding system enables value capture.

GAPS IDENTIFIED

KNOWLEDGE

Limited knowledge of how generated electricity can be tracked, used, or sold

CULTURAL

Farming decisions are linked to family structure - Land disputes and role division

TECHNOLOGICAL

Price sensitivity towards automation and energy storage technologies

VALUE GENERATION

Not enough value generation from unutilised solar energy for farmers to invest

Four systemic gaps emerged that were preventing renewable energy from being effectively adopted.

The land was registered in this five year old girl's name to secure policy benefits

OPPORTUNITY MAPPING

Instead of asking:

How do we generate more energy?

we started asking:

How might existing energy be converted into value?

This revealed a two-fold opportunity:

solve electricity reliability at the point of use

create new income streams through surplus energy

Instead of looking for a single solution, we mapped opportunity across the system, identifying where energy is generated and where it creates value.

GENERATION LAYER

Exploring possible models

To test where value creation might be viable, I explored three levels of intervention:

INDIVIDUAL

Energy stays within

the farm

Limited by cost and hard direct income pathway

COMMUNITY

Shared generation and distribution

Reduces individual burden, enables local use

ENTERPRISE

Energy flows to external demand

Strongest potential for stable income

DISTRIBUTION LAYER

At the level of distribution, the opportunity was not within the farm — but in connecting energy to existing demand systems.

This matters because we discovered that solar alone isnt enough and farmers cannot carry additional financial risk in an already volatile livelihood.

DISCOM / grid

Supports power grid load balancing in agricultural regions

Climate finance

Push in the Indian carbon market through ETS (emission trading scheme)

Agro & industrial use

Use surplus for productive, income-generating activities like drying / manufacturing processes

EV ecosystem

Growing demand for EV in india and building local charging systems

LEARNINGS

This project became a lesson in agile thinking, not because it led to a single neat solution, but because it made visible the constraints of the ecosystem. It shifted my understanding of design from building solutions to understanding systems. I also had the best time immersing myself in a new city and seeing how language, rituals, culture shape end up shaping agriculture in India.

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